The waiting room: Transitional space and transitional drawing
(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)
Chapter 13
The waiting room
Transitional space and transitional drawing
Susan Hedges
What great genius invented the waiting room? Every sublime idea no doubt is simple, but Simplicity alone is never enough. A cube sequestered in space and filled with time, Pure time, refined, distilled, denatured time Without qualities, without even dust …¹
The waiting room can be imagined as a frequently visited place, a room to linger, to sit or stand, to walk and converse. It is a transitional point before entering or moving to another room, in which no actual movements of the journey occur, but where time is implied. It is a place where our attention may be directed toward the fact that the passage of time has slowed down, until later it seems as if no time has passed at all.²
The waiting drawing offers a sense of marking time, an instant of concentrated activity, perhaps with whatever drawing instrument and surface is ready at hand. A seized drawn moment is an attempt to possess
time; these kinds of drawings may be followed by further transitional drawings, repeating moment from moment. The waiting drawing described in this chapter is seen not as an answer, but rather, as a marking of time. It is explored through the waiting room as a point of mobility and temporary arrest, a place where the fixed and mobile converge. The waiting room, suspended in time and structure to be entered and explored, becomes an architecture that renders itself uninhabitable to the extent that we understand aesthetic experience – not as a recollection of a timeless reality, but as an experience that is as if it had no duration.
This chapter models a narrative of the waiting room with a study of the Auckland Railway Station (1928–1930) designed by Gummer and Ford and Partners. In particular, singled out for closer examination is “Sheet No. 24 Details of Ladies’ Waiting Room,” as a means to consider the waiting drawn detail in the now obsolete Auckland Railway Station. The waiting drawing is represented as a paneled interior of recurrence, an experience of time, and a prediction of time on itself. The sheet simultaneously shows complexity, incompleteness, and a promise of structured waiting.
The waiting room and the waiting drawing
Waiting is a common human experience. Often the impression it conveys is one of anxiety, boredom, and anonymity. People are distributed among rows of seats, figures thrown together at the mercy of someone, or something for which they are consigned to wait. They wait in separation from each other, unspeaking, or in chattering groups. “All things come to those who wait,” implies an understanding of waiting that is anything but resigned, accepting, and inevitable. The patience of waiting becomes a vigilant attentiveness, perhaps surfacing amid uncertain respites, an arduous experience of unsure stillness affected by time, speed, and sluggishness.
Walter Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project that “waiting is in a sense the well-varnished interior of boredom, that rather than pass the time, one must invite it in.” Benjamin equates boredom with waiting. To wait “is ultimately the same as refusing the idea of change, and this refusal
suggests that boredom and waiting are figures of resistance to the empty recurrence of history.” Literary theorist Mieke Bal writes of the pause as the moment in a waiting room before entering or moving to another in which the narrative remains stationary. It is a pause where our attention is directed toward the fact that the passage of time has slowed down, a disruption to the flow of time and function, and a silence in the construction of the narrative.
Waiting for a train at the station, building rhythms are slowed, a kind of stillness results, a pause in time and movement. Expecting an imminent arrival or departure at an indicated time, timetables become links between the present and the future. The waiting for an event the occurrence of which is certain – although not always on time, or completely uncertain, even when the train is delayed – the time and place become an interstitial period.
Waiting drawing and the waiting detail For some, the waiting drawing is a moment to capture an instant in a few quick strokes, a transitional drawing that is a marking of time, perhaps a careless regard for passing hours rather than a search for an answer. The transitional drawing is made up of differences in weight, interval, and motion, moments of intense activity, of getting something down and seizing the moment. Drawing as waiting or expectation is a projection into the future. As the waiting drawing may reside in the long process of thinking, making, breaking, and remaking, time figures as both contemplative and instantaneous. The specific is approached with a fastidious attention to the unseen – the invisible – and allowing in retrospect for the invisible to be seen. It is a reflection of the drawing process itself, but also an overriding awareness that in order to break new ground, each moment of doing contributes to another sense of the “whole.” For the drawer, these moments of doing, looking, thinking, and reflecting are critical within the process of making a piece of work, but on completion of the work they also provide a
time for thought. Making the drawing becomes a way of seeing time; a spatializing of time.
For architect Marco Frascari, architectural drawing is a heuristic device. “It is a slow process of architectural sapience based on the ideas of lingering, savoring, and touching. It is based on the ‘adagio’ time and common places, proverbs, or rules of thumb.” For Frascari, labor-intensive lines offer a sensory understanding of architecture. Drawing and waiting are expectations – a projection into the future. Labor-intensive architectural drawings, material and substance, the conceiving of a place to wait. A lingering line, a tactile savoring, the same as slow time, sheets that are marked, inked, penciled, or brushed, labor-intensive architectural drawings, for users that cannot be predicted or estimated. Frascari writes:
Slowness is often related to negative values of clumsiness, disinterest, sloth, and tedium, conditions that do not include the positive effects resulting from paused, well-thought, and safe attitudes. Architectural drawings are islands of slowness within the stormy sea of the pseudo-fastness of the building industry.
In some respects, the waiting drawing can be seen as an initial graphic portrayal of an idea, directly from observation, or the memory of something seen. Perhaps a preconceived plan, a projection of possibility, the drawing is an idea generation, development, and modification. The waiting detail in this light is a drawing performed in order to possess time, to capture the possibilities seized in the moment; a moment of actualization.
The waiting room and the railway station
Construction of the Auckland Railway Station by architects Gummer and Ford began in 1928 and was completed in 1930. It was the largest contract undertaken in New Zealand at the time. Red brick set between classical compositions of Corinthian columns with entablature, Roman arches, and coffered ceilings, a monumental entrance with a grand foyer, and elaborate
systems of scale and surface make up the station. The building was reported at the time to
… offer something new to New Zealand architecture in the way of interior decoration, and it is safe to say that many Auckland people will be astonished, when they enter the station for the first time, at the bold employment of colors in the decorative scheme. No other building in Auckland depends so literally on the artist’s palette for its mural ornamentation.\footnote{Arrival at the railway station is a passage through a grand lobby to a long concourse, a movement toward a large space housing the static pleasure of architectural detail (Figure 13.1). The appeal of the building lies in its stillness and sculptural depth, in its implied resistance to the world of speed, surface, and image. From here, people depart for the sea and the mountains, a complex network connecting distances, people, and places. Platforms bristle with anticipation, the clutter of rushing people, porters, and carts. The anticipation of the landscape to be experienced is colored by the staccato rhythms that connect ticket counters, corridors, and waiting rooms.}
In the Auckland Railway Station, spaces for arrival and departure extended the small scale of the city; boundaries between town and countryside fell away to railway stations, transfers, junctions, and stops. For Auckland, remote places began to connect. Destination signs and plaques of cities and towns along the length of the concourse implied a sense of
distance. An impressive masonry façade and a vast open concourse, roofed with glass and supported by iron and steel trusses, the station became stalled in its tracks a mile or two away from the center of the city, the size of the station an ungainly interloper.
Conceived as a grand railway station, the building was never tested to its full capacity. Its intended use as a point of convergence of the city’s movement, a connector for trains, cars, radio signals, trams, and pedestrians, as well as money, goods, and information, was perhaps, for a moment, actualized in the early days of its construction; a “swirling manifold of circuitry, switching points and deterritorialized, non-grounded flows.” In the 1990s, however, its use shifted to student accommodation. The exterior shell remained relatively intact under a “category 1” rating of the Historic Places Trust. The interior changed dramatically. Along the lengthy concourse, three rooms have become TV lounges, and the ticket counter and the entrance have been preserved. What has been lost?
Beyond the vestibule is another striking feature of the layout, a broad concourse which gives access to all the adjuncts of a modern station including dining room, refreshment buffet, waiting rooms, barber’s shop, dressing rooms, lavatories, post, telegraph offices, ambulance, book stall, fruit stall, etc. The night traveler will here find facilities for cleansing, rest, and refreshment in preparation for his day of business or pleasure in the city. Here, the tired suburban shopper will obtain afternoon tea daintily and restfully served. Such services and amenities, though well established abroad, will be to a large extent experimental with us, and it will rest with the public to give them their sympathy and support so that they may be developed to their fullest usefulness.
The ladies’ waiting room
The waiting room sits somewhere between location and dislocation, a semi-public gateway to private places, a somewhat ambiguous place, occupying
an uncanny position within the larger scheme of the building (Figure 13.2). Little has changed in this 40-by-15-foot room, a combination of movement, stasis, space, and events, as the building has been assembled and disassembled into a melancholic – and somewhat comic – character. The concourse and its adjoining waiting rooms at the edge of the city appear unfamiliar and unhomely.
The ladies’ waiting room is a dark interior with paneled walls. A clock and a mantelpiece face each other below a kind of Wedgwood ceiling in white and blue, where three silver chandeliers were once suspended from the ceiling. Time slows as one enters the room, thickened with its connection to the past of the railway station, a golden age of travel in the history of Auckland City. Dark paneled walls, ornate windows, and a clock reveal a transitory space in a transitory building for women who wait. The name of the room memorializes movement, speed, and stillness. The grand notions of progress, moment, and technology have become an uncanny room for temporary occupation and a place to wait.
The waiting room is a semi-private transition to the fully public space of the concourse, an upholstered, paneled haven. Some people will not pass through; it is a place for waiting and a peculiar limbo used before or after travel. The opportunity to construct narratives out of static scenes through repetitive waiting and minimal signs of activity – the checking of a clock or lipstick, an exchange of glances – sees the room as a threshold between stasis and movement. A transient population is viewed from the dark interior through to the bright light of the concourse, neither fully public nor fully private, an indeterminate character.
The room is caught between different scaled times and spaces. They meet one another in pockets of unrelated and ephemeral interiorities. Social roles and conventions have regulated, determined, and produced the interior; etiquettes and excluding boundaries construct and save the waiting interior, a constructed possibility of privacy. The nature of stillness, contemplative and instantaneous, the waiting room is positioned indifferently in a moment of stasis, originally against taxis, tickets, guides, and porters. Timetables, arrivals, and departures, the starting point for a new journey, sees the waiting room as a moment of running in place. Today, the room still waits, empty, caught singularly against a building that has changed. The clock face disassociates time, spatially projected in vision in a rationalized notational form. Vanquishing time, “the clock reduces fraught,
immanent time to a single transcendent time, it relates all events to a single ‘thin’ duration that is general – the same for everyone, for all processes.”19 For the Auckland Railway station:
There are sixty-two clocks in the station, all controlled from one master clock in the stationmaster’s room. Two of the clocks are in the vestibule and two in the concourse, one is in the general waiting room, another in the ladies’ waiting room, and there is one in the dining room and one in the coffee room. Clocks, indeed, are all over the place, and one has scarcely to turn one’s head to see the time.
Waiting drawings Architectural critic Sanford Kwinter writes in Architectures of Time that modernism changed the theories of time “in which time no longer remains spatialized in order to furnish the stable ground or backdrop for phenomena, but meshes inextricably with them, and forms the new rule of their endless and aleatory proliferation.”21 The calendar and the clock are ways of seeing absolute time but with no physical reality. Plans, sections, and elevations are horizontal-vertical slices in a moment of time, a representation of space rather than time. What of the attempt to draw time, what of the gradual changes to space through the design process and possible future occupations?
The drawing set consists of seventy-eight drawings on linen sheets beginning with site plans and track lines, finishing with detail to stanchions and cross sections of the subway. Ornate, partially drawn details show wooden panels and fluting, plastered false ceilings, pierced carvings, bronzed radiator grills, beveled mirrors, marble mantelpiece, openings to the concourse and ladies’ lavatory, and a place for the clock. Step by step, decisions have been made and project plans redrawn and newly drawn. Every stroke counts; every screw has to be in the right place. The waiting room, like many interiors, is transient, subject to fashion and impermanent
materials, to short lives with frequent renovation. The ladies’ waiting room appears caught between moving occupation, its surfaces emanating the atmosphere of its past.
Architect Mark Wigley suggests that the surface wraps the atmosphere: the outer visible layer of an invisible climate where architecture moves from the initial rough sketch to finely calibrated working drawings; the lines on paper without atmosphere cleared of any effect, nothing to threaten the authority of the line. “Sheet No. 24 Detail to Ladies’ Waiting Room” holds to norms and conventions, recording a finished room. Running dimensions, tolerances, and building materials define the space between building elements, their dimensions, the recording of the building, and the coordination of the structure. Sheet No. 24 can also be seen as a decorative surface that exudes an atmosphere that the viewer of the drawings is meant to experience, something of the building’s atmosphere. Drawings are atmosphere simulators, and even the most abstract lines produce sensuous, unpredictable effects (Figure 13.3).
The plan and section, to be imagined as horizontal or vertical slices, simultaneously reveal solids and voids its surfaces and nodes, an improbable abstraction representing a multitude of constructed spatial ideas; the waiting line representing a surface that has remained still while the neighboring interiors have shifted.
What of the waiting room?
For the remnants of the station, the loss itself is significant: a fragment of a living thing that people once built their lives around, and of which nothing much remains. The railway station, choked by the indifferent architecture of apartments that surround it, has become a forlorn building and a melancholic interior where the fixed and mobile converged.
With a partial dismembering of its interior, the building is a victim of time and place; no throng of people, no busy porters, just an empty lobby and an even emptier waiting room. The ladies’ waiting room still conjures a scene where absence becomes the room’s principle feature. For part of its
history, the room held people, furniture, luggage, a warm radiator, and a clock above the mantelpiece. The empty room and somewhat deserted building offer a drought of sound, an aural desert where light enters unobserved over unburdened chairs. The room is unable to be read as part of a larger whole. Time has slowed, and passing circumstance sees other parts of the building move in other directions. The waiting room has an unwitnessed existence; walls, ceilings, doors, and windows are cupped around a space and have held it for a while. Something else occupies this mysterious emptiness and the different sounds that time makes in passing.
Figure 13.3 Detail to Sheet No. 24 Details of Ladies Waiting Room, August 1927, Scale ½", ¼" and Full Size, Gummer and Ford, Architects and Structural Engineers, Auckland Railway Station, 1010 × 640 linen, original with annotations. Image credit: Ministry of Architecture + Interiors Ltd.
The waiting drawing intertwines, connects, and pulls taut. It undoes and reconnects the different strands, a marker for something that was emerging, something provisionally knitted together that has permitted us to undo and redo in order to forestall premature closure. This chapter is not an attempt to restage history as it was, but rather, it explores historical knowledge as an ongoing reconstruction in the present located somewhere between fact and fiction. The remnant lobby and waiting rooms, as points of mobility and temporary rest, are caught in time where many voices have just left the building. For Frascari,
The best part begins when the plan is torn to pieces by history, defeated by events, chewed by time; when it reaches us as an incomprehensible collage of forgotten memories as an unexpected and enigmatic structure, as existential lust, as pure decoration.25
Notes 1 Howard Nemerov, The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 459. 2 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), p. 108. 3 Karsten Harries, “Buildings and the Terror of Time”, Perspecta 19 (1982): 59–69, 64. 4 He goes on to suggest, “to pass the time (to kill time, expel it): the gambler. Time spills from his every pore. – To store time as a battery stores energy: the flâneur. Finally, the third type: he who waits. He takes in the time and renders it up in altered form – that of expectation.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project; Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin; Prepared on the Basis of the German Volume Edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 107. 5 “Through a dialectical shift in the experience of time, and opening toward a change beyond all prediction. Boredom is always the outward sign of unconscious happening… One must not waste time but must load time into oneself …” Ref (5.1.162, 164) cited 7776 in: J. Rolleston, “The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project”, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 104 (1 January 1989): 13–27, 7, 19.
6 Mieke Bal, Narratology, p. 108. 7 Derek Pigrum, “Drawing, Dasein and the ‘Ready-to-Hand’”, Studies in Material Thinking 4 (2010): 10. 8 Angela Eames, “Embedded Drawing”, in Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research, ed. Steve Garner (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2008), p. 136. 9 Marco Frascari, “Lines as Architectural Thinking”, Architectural Theory Review 14, no. 3 (2009): 200–212, 201. 10 “Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territories, architects should write and draw with hesitation, discovering the multiple aspects of architectural graphes, a generative graphic process understood in its slow making.” Marco Frascari, “Lines as Architectural Thinking”, Architectural Theory Review 14, no. 3 (2009): 200–212, 202. 11 Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow-Food for the Architect’s Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 29. 12 William Henry Gummer and Charles Reginald Ford were prominent architects in Auckland, beginning their practice in 1923 and finishing in 1961. Trained under the beaux-arts traditions at the Royal Academy of arts, they are responsible for some of the architectural landmarks of Auckland City, including the New Zealand Insurance Building (1914), the Guardian Trust Building (1921), the Dilworth Building, (1926), and the Domain Wintergardens (1928). 13 “Railway Decoration”, New Zealand Herald LXVII, no. 20698 (18 October 1930): 13, Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Ma`tauranga o Aotearoa, https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZH19301018.2.129 (accessed 28 December 2014). 14 Due to Auckland City Council’s decision not to proceed with an underground system, the building due to its awkward location became dislocated from the city. The New Zealand Railway service later abandoned this station for relocation to the Britomart Transportation Centre. It was sold during the privatization of the rail network in the 1990s, and has since been converted to student accommodation by ADC Architects. 15 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 86. 16 “Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga”, 1985, www.heritage.org.nz/the-list/details/93&sm= (accessed 27 March 2015). 17 W.R. Davidson, “Auckland’s New Railway Station: The Northern Portal of the N.Z.R”, The New Zealand Railways Magazine 2, no. 6 (1 October 1927): 26–36, 32 (accessed 4 April 2014).
18 “Railway Decoration”, New Zealand Herald LXVII, no. 20698 (18 October 1930): 13, Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Ma`tauranga o Aotearoa, https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZH19301018.2.129 (accessed 28 December 2014).
19 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time, p. 21.
20 “Spacious Railway Yard”, New Zealand Herald LXVII, no. 20729 (24 November 1930): 9, https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZH19301124.2.168.22 (accessed 28 December 2014).
21 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time, p. 36.
22 Mark Wigley, “The Architecture of Atmosphere”, Daidalos 68 (1998): 18–27, 26.
23 Anette Spiro and David Ganzoni, eds. The Working Drawing: The Architect’s Tool (Zurich: Park Books, 2013), 145.
24 Mark Wigley, “The Architecture of Atmosphere”, pp. 18–27, 27.
25 Marco Frascari, “Plans”, Terrazzo 1 (1988): 96–131, 97.
