This article presents a study of an algebra spanned by the faces of a hyperplane arrangement. The quiver with relations of the algebra is computed and the algebra is shown to be a Koszul algebra. It is shown that the algebra depends only on the intersection lattice of the hyperplane arrangement. A complete system of primitive orthogonal idempotents for the algebra is constructed and other algebraic structure is determined including: a description of the projective indecomposable modules, the Cartan invariants, projective resolutions of the simple modules, the Hochschild homology and cohomology, and the Koszul dual algebra. A new cohomology construction on posets is introduced, and it is shown that the face semigroup algebra is isomorphic to the cohomology algebra when this construction is applied to the intersection lattice of the hyperplane arrangement.

A lemma of Tits establishes a connection between the simple connectivity of an incidence geometry and the universal completion of an amalgam induced by a sufficiently transitive group of automorphisms of that geometry. In the present paper, we generalize this lemma to intransitive geometries, thus opening the door for numerous applications. We treat ourselves some amalgams related to intransitive actions of finite orthogonal groups, as a first class of examples.