There’s this weird feeling you get walking through an empty airport terminal at 3 AM.
I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to understand why certain spaces—parking garages at dusk, hotel hallways, abandoned malls—trigger this specific emotional response that the internet has decided to call “liminal.” Turns out the architecture itself is doing something to our brains, and it’s not just about emptiness. These transitional spaces were designed with a very particular purpose: to move us from point A to point B without making us linger, which means they employ a kind of architectural grammar that’s deliberately neutral, almost aggressively unremarkable. The fluorescent lighting, the repetitive patterns, the conspicuous absence of personal touches—it all serves a function, but when you remove the crowds, when you strip away the intended use, what remains is this uncanny shell that our pattern-seeking brains don’t quite know how to process.
Architects call them “non-places,” a term coined by anthropologist Marc Augé in the early 1990s. He was talking about airports, highway rest stops, hotel chains—spaces defined by transience rather than residence. The aesthetics are intentional, honestly.
Wait—maybe I should back up a bit here because there’s a neurological component that gets overlooked in all the internet discourse about liminal spaces and their supposed creepiness.
The Cognitive Dissonance of Architectural Expectations and Spatial Memory
Our brains are constantly making predictions about what should happen next in any given environment.
When you walk into a shopping mall during business hours, your brain anticipates crowds, movement, the ambient noise of commerce and conversation—basically, your hippocampus is running a simulation based on past experiences, and when reality matches those expectations, you don’t even notice the prediction happening. But here’s the thing: when you encounter these same spaces empty or in unusual contexts, there’s a prediction error, a mismatch between what your brain expected and what your senses are actually recieving. This creates a low-level anxiety response that some people find unsettling and others find weirdly compelling. The Japanese have a concept called “ma,” which roughly translates to the space between things, the pause, the interval—and liminal architecture exists almost entirely in this conceptual territory, neither here nor there, neither beginning nor destination.
Why Transitional Spaces Resist Photographic Documentation in Conventional Ways
I used to think the liminal space aesthetic was just a photography trend, honestly, but it’s more complicated.
These spaces are designed to be forgettable, which means they resist the usual techniques of architectural photography—the dramatic angles, the golden hour lighting, the careful composition that makes buildings look monumental or significant. When photographers started documenting liminal spaces in the mid-2010s, they had to develop a different visual language, one that emphasized the mundane, the slightly-off, the uncannily ordinary. The images that work best are the ones that feel like screenshots from a dream you can’t quite remember, where the perspective is slightly wrong or the lighting suggests a time of day that doesn’t quite exist. There’s often a conspicuous absence of human figures, which shouldn’t work from a composition standpoint—every photography textbook will tell you that humans provide scale and interest—but the emptiness is the entire point, it’s what transforms a utilitarian space into something that triggers that peculiar emotional response.
The Temporal Displacement Effect in Architectural Nostalgia and Collective Memory
Anyway, there’s also this nostalgia component that nobody really talks about.
Many of the spaces that circulate in liminal aesthetic communities—the beige-carpeted offices, thePoolRooms with their yellowed lighting, the endless backrooms—are specifically dated to the 1980s and 1990s, a period when institutional architecture had a very particular look that’s now become associated with a kind of collective childhood memory for millennials and elder Gen Z. The aesthetics of that era—drop ceilings, fluorescent tubes, geometric patterns in muted colors, an almost aggressive commitment to functionality over form—created environments that were meant to be completely neutral, and in their neutrality, they became strangely universal. You could be in an office building in Ohio or a hospital in Australia, and the visual language would be remarkably similar, which creates this dislocated feeling when you encounter these spaces now, like you’re remembering somewhere you’ve definately been before even though you haven’t, not exactly.
How Digital Communities Have Recontextualized the Meaning of Architectural Banality
The internet did something unexpected with these spaces.
What started as people sharing uncanny photographs of empty places evolved into an entire aesthetic movement, complete with its own terminology, its own archives, its own creative production—people started building virtual liminal spaces in video games and 3D rendering software, trying to capture and intensify that specific feeling of displacement and strangeness. This is fascinating from a cultural perspective because it represents a kind of collective reclamation of spaces that were designed to be invisible, to facilitate movement without creating attachment. By isolating these environments, by removing their intended function and examining them purely as aesthetic objects, digital communities have transformed architectural banality into something almost sacred, a shared emotional experience that transcends the original utilitarian purpose. I guess it makes sense that in an era of algorithmic optimization and hyper-designed experiences, there’s something compelling about spaces that were never meant to be noticed at all, that exist only to get you somewhere else, and in their very ordinariness contain a kind of accidental poetry that nobody intended but everyone seems to recognize.
