- > The crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the _flâneur_. In it, the city was now landscape, now a room. And both of these went into the construction of the department store, which made use of _flânerie_ itself in order to sell goods. The department store was the _flâneur's_ final coup. As _flâneurs_, the intelligentsia came into the market place. As they thought, to observe it – but in reality it was already to find a buyer. In this intermediary stage... they took the form of the _[bohème](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemianism "Bohemianism")_. To the uncertainty of their economic position corresponded the uncertainty of their political function.
- Drawing on Fournel, and on his analysis of the poetry of Baudelaire, [Walter Benjamin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin "Walter Benjamin") described the _flâneur_ as the essential figure of the modern urban spectator, an amateur detective and investigator of the city. More than this, his _flâneur_ was a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism. For Benjamin, the _flâneur_ met his demise with the triumph of [consumer capitalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_capitalism "Consumer capitalism").[\[7\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur#cite_note-benjamin-7)
- Fournel wrote: "The _flâneur_ must not be confused with the _badaud_; a nuance should be observed there.... The simple _flâneur_ is always in full possession of his individuality, whereas the individuality of the _badaud_ disappears. It is absorbed by the outside world... which intoxicates him to the point where he forgets himself. Under the influence of the spectacle which presents itself to him, the _badaud_ becomes an impersonal creature; he is no longer a human being, he is part of the public, of the crowd."[\[8\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur#cite_note-FOOTNOTEFournel1867270-8)[\[1\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur#cite_note-FOOTNOTEShaya2004-1)
**Information is like a bank. Some of us are rich, some of us are poor with information. All of us can be rich. Our job - your job is to rob the bank, to kill the guard. We go out there to destroy everybody, who keeps and hides the whole information. Genesis P. Orridge **
Once we castarchitecture into cyberspace, these concerns take on both theoretical and practical urgency. The architect must now take into active interest not only the motion of the user through the environment, but also account for the fact that the environment itself, unencumbered by gravity and other common constraints, may itself change position, attitude, or attribute. This new choreographic consideration is already a profound extension of responsibilities and opportunities, but it still corresponds only to “movement-image”. Far more interesting and difficult is the next step, in which the environment is understood not only to move, but also to breathe and transform, to be cast into the wind not like a stone but like a bird. What this requires is the design of mechanisms and algorithms of animation and interactivity for every act of architecture. Mathematically, this means that time must now be added to the long list of parameters of which architecture is a function.
