Liminal spaces are physical spaces that serve as a transition between one space and another, and they don't constitute a destination in themselves. These are places that typically serve only as passageways—their role is to connect point A with point B. In everyday life, we rarely pay attention to them. Examples? Hallways, stairwells, elevators, waiting rooms, underpasses, tunnels, bridges, entrance halls, station platforms. All these locations exist to lead somewhere else. They are on the borderline—neither inside nor outside, neither here nor there.
In architecture, liminal spaces are often deliberately designed to be neutral and transparent—they're meant to avoid drawing attention to themselves. They serve as a backdrop to our daily rush: we pass through them automatically, our minds full of our destinations. However, a change of context is enough for their extraordinary nature to emerge. An empty office corridor on a weekend, a deserted airport in the middle of the night, a deserted playground at dawn—these are liminal spaces in their purest form. When the crowds and daily hustle and bustle are gone, these places begin to exude a unique aura.
The popularity of the concept of liminal space in popular culture exploded around 2019, with the spread of a specific aesthetic online. Hundreds of photos depicting empty, often dimly lit spaces began circulating on social media: long school hallways devoid of students, shuttered supermarkets at night, neon-lit parking lots devoid of cars, abandoned playgrounds. The flashpoint was a famous post on 4chan presenting so-called Backrooms — an endless labyrinth of empty, yellowish office spaces with musty carpets and buzzing fluorescent lights. The description stated that by "slipping beyond the boundaries of reality," one could enter these endless rooms and corridors and become trapped, a space supposedly inhabited by unspecified entities. Backrooms have become a modern internet legend and the quintessence of liminal aesthetics – a place devoid of people, surreal in its emptiness and monotony, arousing both curiosity and fear.
The characteristic features of liminal spaces, from an aesthetic perspective, are precisely this: abandonment, emptiness, silence, the absence of human presence, and a sense of time standing still. Such photographs or places often evoke a mixture of emotions in viewers. There's nostalgia, as many of these scenes seem familiar (e.g., a school hallway evokes childhood memories), but also anxiety, as something is clearly out of place (a school should never be so empty during the day; a store is usually bustling with activity). It's this sense that "something is wrong here" that gives liminal spaces a touch of subtle horror or dreamlike quality.
Some aesthetic researchers draw attention to the phenomenon called "kenopsia" - a term (jokingly coined by John Koenig in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows ) describing the peculiar atmosphere of a place that is normally teeming with life, but is now empty and quiet.
Examples of kenopsia include school after school, a deserted playground at dusk, or a city center street during the Covid-19 pandemic. We feel a strange mixture of peace and anxiety—peace because the place is quiet, and anxiety because we intuitively expect the presence of people, movement, and sound. Their absence evokes a slight cognitive discomfort.
Psychologically, liminal spaces confront us with silence and stillness, which many of us have grown unaccustomed to. Modern humans live in a constant stream of stimuli—noise, music, conversations, advertising—and rarely, if ever, experience complete silence. Therefore, being in a place completely devoid of stimuli can be incredibly intense.
As one commentator noted, such scenes "strike a silence frozen in time—the same silence we fear daily, drowning it out with headphones during the slightest breaks in activity." The liminal void forces us to contemplate, to listen to our own thoughts—which can be downright uncomfortable for some. This unbearable silence and sense of suspension can cause our imaginations to conjure up various scenarios: we expect something or someone to appear, walk down the hall, break the stagnation… and yet, nothing of the sort happens.
As a result, liminal spaces are often perceived as "dreamy" or "unreal." Many people compare them to dreamscapes—when we dream, we also often find ourselves in places we supposedly know, but something is missing or strangely transformed. Empty corridors and train stations have something of a nightmare about them—they are familiar yet alien at the same time. This contradiction fascinates and unsettles, drawing our attention.
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