There’s something oddly magnetic about liminal spaces. Not quite one thing or another, they sit between uses, between moments. Hallways. Stairwells. Bus stations in the early hours. Multi-storey carparks on a Sunday afternoon. These are the places most people move through without really seeing. And yet—they stick in the memory, somehow.
In architecture, liminality is often unintentional. A byproduct of planning. These spaces are designed as conduits: they connect, transition, usher.
But the experience of them can be unexpectedly rich. Not always in the traditional sense—beauty, materiality, light—but in atmosphere. Mood. A sense of dislocation that can feel uncanny, even cinematic.
Consider the underground passages of Montreal’s RÉSO network. Built to shelter pedestrians from bitter winters, it spans over 32 kilometres, connecting shops, office towers, metro stations, hotels. Functionally brilliant. But spend enough time there, particularly off-peak, and it begins to feel peculiar. A kind of subterranean echo chamber. Lightless and hushed.
Then there’s Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (now demolished), a 1970s experiment in plug-in urbanism by architect Kisho Kurokawa. Each unit was a microcosm—tight, transient, suspended in both time and function. Originally conceived as temporary housing for salarymen, the building aged into obsolescence while retaining a cult following. Not quite habitable, not quite historic. A textbook liminal object, if such a thing exists.
Of course, the internet has played its part in fetishising this kind of space. The ‘liminal space’ aesthetic has grown into a digital micro-genre: grainy photos of empty corridors, desaturated hotel lobbies, out-of-context playgrounds. Some of it veers nostalgic. Some of it just feels…off. Disconnected. It’s not high architecture, but it’s telling. People are drawn to these in-between moments, spatially and emotionally.
From a design perspective, it raises an interesting question. What happens when architects lean into the liminal, rather than smoothing it away? Not to romanticise neglect, but to acknowledge ambiguity as a valid architectural mood. Some contemporary projects do this with quiet intent. The Kunsthaus Bregenz by Peter Zumthor, for instance, plays with emptiness and pause. The in-between is designed, rather than incidental. Each landing, each wall, becomes a moment to breathe—or wonder.
But that’s rare. More often, liminality occurs at the margins of the brief. A side-effect of budget, programming, or movement. Yet it’s these gaps that sometimes leave the deepest impressions.
Maybe the allure of liminal space has something to do with modern life itself. We’re always in transition, flicking between screens, between roles. Liminality mirrors that. It’s not restful, exactly. But it offers a strange kind of pause. A blank.
And perhaps that’s worth noticing. Not every space has to resolve. Some just need to exist, slightly out of sync.
