LIMINAL SPACES : THE EERIE HOLLOWNESS OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE

 LIMINAL SPACES

THE EERIE HOLLOWNESS OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE

 Liminal spaces are those weird, atmospheric, and sometimes eerie places, that look like the gateway to another realm.

Most people can agree that the majority of photos that are the shared above have that special quality of being a bit “off”…and that “off-ness” is indeed what makes a liminal space, “liminal”.

The word “liminal” can be defined as being a “threshold” which is “barely perceptible”. A threshold could be the ghostly space before completing a rite of passage, or the ambiguous space in which we transition into another form. Liminal spaces are perhaps, the unknowable, or unspeakable spaces that seem to be ever-present in our dreams. These are places in which appear real but because of their strange aura, we know for sure that they are indeed fictitious.

WHY LIMINALITY?

The reason why we are fascinated with these images of vacant, abandoned, and eerie locations is that, for the most part, they represent the false promises of the modern era. Perhaps, the best liminal space photos are the ones that show some sort of modern architecture. It could be a home, a commercial property, or the inside of a hotel or mall. These photos usually have no human subjects in the photos and in some cases, the interior spaces have no windows at all.

Sometimes, these claustrophobic images help us understand the loneliness and futility of modern architectural achievements. Without the distraction of living subjects in the photos, the sometimes absurd spaciousness helps us realize that even in the comfort of our own home, neighborhood, or city…we are in nothing more than an artificial desert, one made to distract us from the reality and spontaneity of our natural world.

But even worse, these interior spaces are like chambers. It is one thing to be lost in the wilderness, but to be lost in the hallways of your own creation, is another thing entirely.

This notion and fascination with “abandonment” or “decay” is not only explored in India, but it may also be discovered in countries like Japan. Take Shane Thoms’s book Haikyo: The Modern Ruins of Japan, for example. In it, he highlights some of those most fascinating shells of modern expansion on the continent, capturing the lostness of gaming centers, amusement parks, and medical centers.

The central problem, as I see it, is the privatization of space, as we wealthy few retreat into our conditioned cocoons and condense our contexts into screens, venturing outside in equally controlled environments, while millions are forced to wander a space that does not belong to them, in which they have no rights, and from which they are often excluded. In a virtual sense, our collective identities (and they are always multiple) are more and more the domain of either private entities or state organizations over which we have little control.

Architecture could and should offer an alternative; as Le Corbusier said, revolution can be avoided . It should find ways to wrest a space of common identity from the state and corporate control. There are concrete techniques to do so, and we have been teaching them for centuries. They include blurring or clouds, liminal or expanded border spaces, spirals that combine aspects of the two techniques above in a more stable manner, or, paradoxically, the creation of empty "rooms,“ monumental and non-functional, that carve out a space of such a holiness or wonder that they keep the world at bay.

Architects have tended to concentrate on the latter technique, but the cost and difficult of creating such rooms is such that they are rare. Moreover, monumentality might work spatially, but it does not work in terms of identity, as it excludes through its semiotic messages. Columns and pediments speak of centuries of control, while large spaces in which you do not do anything in particular also weigh on those of us who do not take or have the time to meditate on the freedoms they afford.

Significance or semiotics are important, and not just a question of style or decoration: the messy vitality of spaces that send confused and contradictory messages are, I believe, more liberating than those that tell you what they are and where (or whether) you belong in their confines.

So I would call for an architecture that does not delineate public and private space, does not articulate the common, and does not connect us in a prescribed manner. I would argue for a leaky, confusing, difficult to understand and perhaps even to use architecture that, somehow, somewhere and maybe even sometimes, creates the sense that we are only truly alive when we are part of a social construct in which we can act out the roles we believe or are proper to us.