The Waiting Room

Definition

The waiting room is Susan Hedges's name for the transitional space of suspension: "a frequently visited place, a room to linger, to sit or stand, to walk and converse… a transitional point before entering or moving to another room, in which no actual movements of the journey occur, but where time is implied." Its defining feature is temporal, not programmatic: it is "a point of mobility and temporary arrest, a place where the fixed and mobile converge," where attention is drawn "toward the fact that the passage of time has slowed down, until later it seems as if no time has passed at all" (after Mieke Bal's narratology of the pause). Following Benjamin, waiting is "in a sense the well-varnished interior of boredom" — but also expectation's altered form of time, and, via Rolleston, a "refus[al] of change": "boredom and waiting are figures of resistance to the empty recurrence of history." The waiting room is accordingly an architecture of paradox: "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" (after Karsten Harries).

Spatially, the waiting room is an indeterminate interior: it "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" — "neither fully public nor fully private, an indeterminate character," "a peculiar limbo used before or after travel," "a threshold between stasis and movement." Temporally, it is "caught between different scaled times and spaces" that "meet one another in pockets of unrelated and ephemeral interiorities." Its canonical instance is the ladies' waiting room of the Auckland Railway Station (Gummer and Ford, 1928–1930): "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 "time slows as one enters the room, thickened with its connection to the past."

The waiting room is also the gendered interior of transit: the Auckland room is "a transitory space in a transitory building for women who wait," whose interior was produced by "social roles and conventions" — "etiquettes and excluding boundaries construct and save the waiting interior, a constructed possibility of privacy." And it is the non-place's thickened other: where Augé's train station is transit space "inherently impersonal and impermanent" (non-places), Hedges's waiting room is space that slows time, holds narrative, and accumulates the atmosphere of its past — the room where, after the throng has gone, "absence becomes the room's principle feature" and the walls, ceilings, doors, and windows are "cupped around a space" that has "an unwitnessed existence."

Key Thinkers

• Susan Hedges — the concept's author: the waiting room as transitional space (mobility and temporary arrest; fixed and mobile converging), modeled through the Auckland Railway Station's ladies' waiting room and its drawing, Sheet No. 24.
• Mieke Bal — the temporal mechanism (via Narratology): the pause as "the moment in a waiting room before entering or moving to another in which the narrative remains stationary… a silence in the construction of the narrative" (not yet paged — see log).
• Walter Benjamin — the waiting/boredom apparatus (via The Arcades Project): "waiting is in a sense the well-varnished interior of boredom"; the three temporal types (gambler, flâneur, he who waits — "he takes in the time and renders it up in altered form – that of expectation").
• Karsten Harries — the aesthetic register (via "Buildings and the Terror of Time"): the waiting room "renders itself uninhabitable to the extent that we understand aesthetic experience… as an experience that is as if it had no duration."

Related Concepts

• waiting-drawing — the room's doubled medium: the drawing that marks time as the room holds it; "Sheet No. 24" as the waiting room's graphic double.
• liminality — the condition the waiting room embodies: "a peculiar limbo used before or after travel," "a threshold between stasis and movement," an "uncanny position" — being-between as a state of occupation.
• non-places — the contrast-set: Augé's train stations are transit spaces of impermanence and solitude; Hedges's waiting room is transit space thickened by waiting, memory, and narrative possibility — the place-interior inside the non-place network.
• temporality — the room's medium: slowed time ("Time slows as one enters the room"), the timetable as "links between the present and the future," and Kwinter's clock as the instrument that "reduces fraught, immanent time to a single transcendent time."
• interiority — the room's held innerness: "pockets of unrelated and ephemeral interiorities"; interiority surviving occupation as "an unwitnessed existence."
• boundaries — the rule-made interior: "etiquettes and excluding boundaries construct and save the waiting interior, a constructed possibility of privacy"; "Some people will not pass through."
• thick-edge — the interior instance of Borden's in-between zone: the waiting room as the thick edge indoors, negotiated between the bright public concourse and the journey.
• gendered-space — the gendered partition of transit: the room "for women who wait," produced and preserved by etiquette as "a constructed possibility of privacy."
• uncanny — the unhomely register: an "uncanny position within the larger scheme of the building"; the room "unfamiliar and unhomely" as progress's technologies become "an uncanny room for temporary occupation."
• narrative-space — the paused narrative: "the opportunity to construct narratives out of static scenes through repetitive waiting"; Bal's narrative that "remains stationary."
• aesthetic-boredom — the room's emotional register: anxiety, boredom, anonymity — and Benjamin's waiting as boredom's inhabited interior, against Franco's boredom-as-failure-of-inhabitability.
• aesthetic-experience — the Harries thesis the room stages: aesthetic experience "as if it had no duration" — the uninhabitable as the room's program rather than its defect.
• adaptive-reuse — the room's afterlife: shell preserved ("category 1"), interior converted to student accommodation — "What has been lost?"
• transitional-space — the concept family: the waiting room as Hedges's temporal transitional space (suspension between states) beside Troutman's house as the psychical transitional space (the illusion-space that holds anxiety) — two meanings the transitional-space page keeps distinct but cross-lit.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The waiting room: Transitional space and transitional drawing (Hedges 2018) — the source that names the concept: the transitional-point definition, the Benjamin/Bal/Harries apparatus, the Auckland Railway Station's ladies' waiting room as case, the gendered and uncanny registers, and the closing ruin-reading ("absence becomes the room's principle feature").
• source-notes/schneiderman-2018-inside-the-prefab-house
• source-notes/troutman-2006-inside-fear

Open Questions

• Is the waiting room a room type (programmed waiting: ladies' waiting room, departure lounge, anteroom) or a room condition (any space in which waiting occurs)? Can a corridor or a threshold be a waiting room, or does waiting require a room that holds it?
• Hedges's waiting room predates and exceeds Augé's non-place: it is a transit space thick with time, gender, and narrative rather than empty of them. Is the modern departure lounge the non-place's replacement for the waiting room — and did something precisely named "waiting" get designed out of transit architecture?
• The singled-out sheet is the ladies' waiting room: is waiting itself a gendered activity (the condition of those who accompany, who are excluded, who wait for others), and does the waiting room's "constructed possibility of privacy" read as protection or confinement?
• If the waiting room "renders itself uninhabitable" (Harries), how does that square with Franco's aesthetic boredom — where boredom names the failure of inhabitability? Is the waiting room the case where uninhabitability is the program, or the case that breaks the inhabitability criterion?
• Can the waiting room be designed for directly — a "promise of structured waiting" — or is waiting always the residue the design cannot absorb (the delayed train, the missed connection, "even when the train is delayed")?