Liminality
Liminality
Definition
Liminality names the condition of being in passage — suspended between two states, spaces, times, or identities, fully in neither. In this wiki the term has appeared in four registers, now consolidated here. The disciplinary register: Liz Teston's disciplinary frontier between interior design and urban design is "a liminal zone; it has thickness… in reality the defined edge is imaginary" — liminality at the scale of knowledge domains. The experiential-architectural register: the McClures' prospect of the aspect, where the Pantheon's colonnaded porch is "a liminal boundary to the plaza" — a threshold that continues spatial recursion rather than stopping it. The room-scale, temporal register (this page's founding source): Susan Hedges's waiting room, the built limbo — "it is a place for waiting and a peculiar limbo used before or after travel"; "the waiting room as a point of mobility and temporary arrest"; "the room as a threshold between stasis and movement"; the waiting period itself "an interstitial period." The folded register: Winka Dubbeldam's crease — "the liminal space between the private and the public" made inhabitable as a surface condition: "Inhabit the slip between former dichotomies. Ride this slip until its surface creases" (p. 100) — liminality not paused in time (the waiting room) but folded into matter (see crease).
The waiting room gathers liminality's three dimensions in one interior: temporal suspension (no movement of the journey occurs, "but… time is implied"; the passage of time "has slowed down"); spatial indeterminacy ("somewhere between location and dislocation, a semi-public gateway to private places"; "neither fully public nor fully private, an indeterminate character"); and social ambiguity (a transient population, distributed "among rows of seats, figures thrown together at the mercy of someone, or something for which they are consigned to wait"). Liminal space is thus not an empty line between states but a state of occupation — with its own furnishings, rules ("etiquettes and excluding boundaries construct and save the waiting interior"), affects (anxiety, boredom, vigilance), and even its own drawing (the waiting drawing).
A fifth, tectonic-epistemic register appears in Johan Voordouw's chapter: the threshold defined by what makes it knowable, and the gradient as liminality's degenerate form. Via Jacques Leenhardt: "Threshold is a zone formed by precise tectonics, an area of knowledge and even of knowability" — the threshold as constructed knowledge, an "'interval between things,' not a continuity seemingly without end." Against it stands the contemporary condition: "Knowing comes from definition; the gradient that is continually blurred is also the zone that prevents knowing." Where the other registers locate liminality in a room, a discipline, an experience, or a fold, this register locates its loss: the between-state expanding until it can no longer be known — and the rescue as periodic clarification (SANAA's walkway that "periodically clarify[ies]… the ambiguity of the undulating surface… to denote scale, direction, and purpose"). See threshold-to-gradient, topological-interiority.
The concept is distinct from its neighbors: thick-edge names the material zone of negotiation (five metres deep, body-scaled); terrain-vague names the urban void (the leftover, unplanned ground); liminality names the condition of being-between wherever it occurs — in a zone, at an edge, in a pause, or in a discipline's frontier. The anthropological lineage of the term (rites of passage, the betwixt-and-between) is not yet treated in this wiki (see log).
A sixth, illicit-practice register appears in Kim Dovey and John Fitzgerald's study of public injecting drug use: the injecting zones as "liminal places which slide between categories of private and public, safety and danger" — "often neither centred nor bounded," found in "the liminal zones of publicly accessible yet legally private space," "less ordered, appropriated and controlled than the fully private or fully public space"; spaces that straddle "the legal and social boundaries between public and private… zones where legally public space comes to seem private since the public have no reason to be there" (2010, pp. 139, 145–146). Here liminality is not a room or a fold but a use-condition: the between-category space sought precisely because categories (policing, exposure) lose their grip in it — and lethal when the between closes (the locked toilet stall "quite safe from police" and "acute danger in the event of an overdose").
Key Thinkers
- Susan Hedges — the room-scale liminal: the waiting room as "a peculiar limbo," "a threshold between stasis and movement," occupying "an uncanny position within the larger scheme of the building"; waiting as "an interstitial period."
- Liz Teston — the disciplinary-scale liminal: the frontier between interior design and urban design as "a liminal zone; it has thickness."
- Ursula Emery McClure & Michael A. McClure — the experiential liminal: the porch as "a liminal boundary to the plaza," thresholds that direct rather than stop passage (the prospect of the aspect).
- Iain Borden — the material-zone relative: the thick edge as the "five metre deep in-between zone" — liminality's socio-spatial form.
Related Concepts
- waiting-room — liminality's furnished room: the place where the between-state is given architecture (seats, clocks, panelling) and duration ("a cube sequestered in space and filled with time").
- thick-edge — the material zone vs. the lived condition: Borden's five-metre edge depth is liminality's architectural thickness; the waiting room is its interior instance.
- disciplinary-frontiers — liminality at the scale of disciplines: the boundary as "liminal zone" whose defined edge "is imaginary."
- boundaries — the rule-systems that bound liminal spaces: who may wait, who passes through, who "will not pass through."
- uncanny — the affect of indeterminacy: the liminal position is "an uncanny position within the larger scheme of the building"; the unhomely as the between-state's signature.
- temporality — liminality's medium: suspension, pause, the interstitial period, the slowed passage of time.
- terrain-vague — the spatial cousin: the urban void and the vacant interior as liminal ground (Hedges's deserted station offers "an aural desert").
- non-places — the supermodern contrast: Augé's transit spaces individuate without relating; the liminal waiting room is transit space with narrative, memory, and etiquette intact.
- inside-outside-dialectic — the between-state as the lived depth of the inside/outside division: "neither fully public nor fully private."
- narrative-space — the paused narrative: Bal's pause, "a silence in the construction of the narrative" — liminality as narrative suspension.
- hermetic-seal — the anti-liminal: the sealed envelope that forecloses the between (the McClures' negative pole), against the threshold held "from both sides at once."
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
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The waiting room: Transitional space and transitional drawing (Hedges 2018) — the room-scale register: "a peculiar limbo used before or after travel"; "a threshold between stasis and movement"; "an uncanny position within the larger scheme of the building"; "the time and place become an interstitial period"; the room "somewhere between location and dislocation," "neither fully public nor fully private."
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Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the disciplinary register: the interior-design/urban-design boundary as "a liminal zone; it has thickness… the defined edge is imaginary" (cross-referenced from disciplinary-frontiers).
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Inside Looking In: The Prospect of the Aspect (McClure & McClure 2018) — the experiential register: the Pantheon's porch as "a liminal boundary to the plaza"; thresholds that frame rather than stop.
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Thing-Shapes (Dubbeldam 2002/2006) — the folded register: "Transgress the liminal space between the private and the public. Disavow the Internet's illusory Utopias of neutrality and democracy. Inhabit the slip between former dichotomies" (p. 100) — liminality as the crease, the between-state folded into a responsive surface rather than suspended in a room. See crease, thing-shapes.
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Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration (Macken 2018) — the creative-act register: the working studio as liminal passage between process and product — during the artist's life, "the studio occupied a liminal space between the act of making and the made" — and the register's loss as the museum's gain: when output ceases, "the physicality of the space is of interest, as the site of former artistic events." Liminality here names the state of production itself — the room in passage from making to made — whose suspension (by death) converts the liminal space into a preserved document. See spatial-document, house-museum.
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Topology and interiority: Folding space inside (Voordouw 2018) — the tectonic-epistemic register: Leenhardt's threshold quoted ("Threshold is a zone formed by precise tectonics, an area of knowledge and even of knowability," p. 169) against the gradient ("Knowing comes from definition; the gradient that is continually blurred is also the zone that prevents knowing"); the threshold as "an 'interval between things,' not a continuity seemingly without end"; and the built intimation — the Rolex Learning Center's wandering path "periodically clarifying in the line of a walkway, momentarily materialized to denote scale, direction, and purpose." Liminality here is not a state to inhabit but a measure of boundary failure: the gradient as the between-state that has swallowed its edges. See threshold-to-gradient, topology.
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Architectural purgatory (Morey & Alkanoglu 2018) — the residential register: the garage as "the architectural equivalent of purgatory" — a liminality that is stored rather than passed through ("Neither Interior nor Exterior…"; "an object… used as needed and forgotten when not") — and its generative pole: the "purgatory of a space" as the suburb's incubator of outliers ("Amazon, HP, Apple, Nirvana… founded within this invisible armature of suburbia"). Liminality here is not passage but residence in the unclassifiable. See architectural-purgatory.
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Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — the domestic, habitual register: liminality as the house's own between-spaces, lived daily rather than crossed once — "They are spaces in which I am usually alone or on the way to somewhere else: the hall, the stairs, the closet, the attic" (p. 357); and liminality's psychic charge — "In this hollow between the self I know and see and the one I do not know and cannot yet see, but sense, I test my own limits" (pp. 357–358) — the between-state as the self's own between (the known and not-yet-known self), housed in the hollow walls. Where Hedges's liminal room suspends the journey's time, Troutman's are the house's standing interstices: passed daily, dwelt in, feared and played in. See hidden-spaces, childhood-spaces, waiting-room.
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Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the illicit-practice register: the injecting zones as "liminal places which slide between categories of private and public, safety and danger" (p. 139); the seclusion/exposure dilemma mapped as a spatial diagram (Fig. 9.7) — "more exposed means safer in the event of an overdose yet more danger from police; more secluded means safer from police yet more danger from an overdose" (p. 147); the fictional-surveillance laneway (a sign with no cameras) as liminal identity exploited by design; the prescription that supervised injecting facilities "should be liminal places which attempt to overcome the binary logic (in/out; either/or) of spatial thinking" — diffuse boundaries, multiple entries, blurred co-location, possibly ephemeral (p. 151); and the institutionalization risk: "do we run the risk of institutionalizing this marginality through the very tactics of liminality… outlined above?" (p. 152). See hidden-spaces, smooth-and-striated-space.
Open Questions
- Does liminality require a passage (from-to, as in rites of passage) or can it be a residence — can one dwell in the liminal (the waiting room occupied for a lifetime of afternoons; the "peculiar limbo… before or after travel")?
- The wiki's registers scale differently (room, discipline, experiential threshold, surface fold). Is there one concept here — thickness of the between — or several metaphors? What would a liminality test be at each scale?
- Is liminality always legible as such to its occupants (the waiter knows they wait), or does the non-place's design aim to erase liminal awareness — passage without pause?
- If Hedges's waiting room is gendered (the ladies' waiting room), is liminality itself unevenly distributed — do some bodies live in the threshold ("a transient population… at the mercy of someone, or something for which they are consigned to wait") while others pass through it as mere transit?
- The anthropological lineage (van Gennep's rites of passage, Turner's liminality and communitas) is not yet paged — would the architectural registers above (waiting room, disciplinary frontier, porch) survive translation into the ritual-anthropological frame, or does architecture's liminality lack the communitas Turner's concept requires?
