The waiting room: Transitional space and transitional drawing

Author: Susan Hedges Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 13 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/hedges_2018-the-waiting-room.md

Summary

Susan Hedges (spatial design, Auckland University of Technology) models a narrative of the waiting room as transitional space through the now-obsolete Auckland Railway Station (Gummer and Ford, 1928–1930), singling out "Sheet No. 24 Details of Ladies' Waiting Room" as the waiting drawing — a transitional drawing that is "seen not as an answer, but rather, as a marking of time." The waiting room is "a point of mobility and temporary arrest, a place where the fixed and mobile converge": a semi-private, gendered interior suspended between the fully public concourse and the journey itself, in which "no actual movements of the journey occur, but where time is implied." The chapter braids Benjamin's waiting/boredom, Bal's narrative pause, Frascari's slow drawing, Kwinter's clock time, and Wigley's atmospheric surface into a theory of interiors that hold time — and closes with a methodological statement that its historical knowledge is "an ongoing reconstruction in the present located somewhere between fact and fiction."

Key Claims

The waiting room is a transitional space defined by suspended movement and implied time: "a transitional point before entering or moving to another room, in which no actual movements of the journey occur, but where time is implied," where "the passage of time has slowed down, until later it seems as if no time has passed at all." See waiting-room, liminality.
The waiting drawing is a marking of time, not an answer: "A seized drawn moment is an attempt to possess time"; 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." See waiting-drawing, representation.
The waiting room is temporally paradoxical architecture: "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" (citing Karsten Harries, "Buildings and the Terror of Time"). See aesthetic-experience.
The chapter's case is "Sheet No. 24 Details of Ladies' Waiting Room" of the Auckland Railway Station, "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."
Waiting's everyday phenomenology: "Waiting is a common human experience. Often the impression it conveys is one of anxiety, boredom, and anonymity"; patience becomes "a vigilant attentiveness… an arduous experience of unsure stillness affected by time, speed, and sluggishness." See aesthetic-boredom, everyday-life.
Benjamin's grounding (via The Arcades Project, p. 107): "waiting is in a sense the well-varnished interior of boredom, that rather than pass the time, one must invite it in"; Benjamin's three temporal types — the gambler (who kills time), the flâneur (who stores time "as a battery stores energy"), and "he who waits. He takes in the time and renders it up in altered form – that of expectation." See aesthetic-boredom, flaneur.
Waiting as resistance: 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" (via Rolleston's reading of Benjamin). See history.
Mieke Bal's narratology of the pause: the pause is "the moment in a waiting room before entering or moving to another in which the narrative remains stationary… a disruption to the flow of time and function, and a silence in the construction of the narrative." See narrative-space.
Timetables as temporal infrastructure: "Expecting an imminent arrival or departure at an indicated time, timetables become links between the present and the future"; waiting for events certain or uncertain makes "the time and place become an interstitial period." See temporality, time-geography.
The transitional drawing: "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." Its process temporality: "Making the drawing becomes a way of seeing time; a spatializing of time." See waiting-drawing.
Frascari's slow drawing as the chapter's method-ground: architectural drawing 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"; "Architectural drawings are islands of slowness within the stormy sea of the pseudo-fastness of the building industry." (See PAGE NEEDED: Frascari.)
The waiting room's spatial indeterminacy: 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"; it is "a semi-private transition to the fully public space of the concourse… a peculiar limbo used before or after travel"; "neither fully public nor fully private, an indeterminate character." See liminality, uncanny, boundaries.
The gendered interior: "Dark paneled walls, ornate windows, and a clock reveal a transitory space in a transitory building for women who wait"; "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." See gendered-space, separate-spheres.
The clock as rationalized time's instrument inside the room of suspension: Kwinter — "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" (Kwinter, p. 21); the station had sixty-two clocks "all controlled from one master clock in the stationmaster's room." See temporality.
Against plans as time-slices: "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…?" See representation.
The interior's transience: "The waiting room, like many interiors, is transient, subject to fashion and impermanent materials, to short lives with frequent renovation." See obsolescence.
Wigley's atmosphere via the drawing: "the surface wraps the atmosphere: the outer visible layer of an invisible climate"; and Hedges's claim from Sheet No. 24: it "can also be seen as a decorative surface that exudes an atmosphere that the viewer of the drawings is meant to experience… Drawings are atmosphere simulators, and even the most abstract lines produce sensuous, unpredictable effects." See atmosphere.
The station's biography: Gummer and Ford's 1928–1930 Beaux-Arts station — "the largest contract undertaken in New Zealand at the time" — was "never tested to its full capacity"; in the 1990s its use shifted to student accommodation, the exterior shell intact under a "category 1" Historic Places Trust rating while "the interior changed dramatically." "What has been lost?" See adaptive-reuse, obsolescence.
The ruin register: "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"; the ladies' waiting room "still conjures a scene where absence becomes the room's principle feature"; the empty room offers "a drought of sound, an aural desert where light enters unobserved over unburdened chairs." See uncanny, interiority, terrain-vague.
The methodological thesis: "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." See history, interior-architecture.
The closing figure: "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."

Connections

Concepts: waiting-room · waiting-drawing · liminality · representation · temporality · interiority · uncanny · non-places · narrative-space · atmosphere · boundaries · thick-edge · gendered-space · aesthetic-boredom · aesthetic-experience · history · adaptive-reuse · obsolescence · deterritorialisation · separate-spheres · flaneur · time-geography Authors: Susan Hedges · Gregory Marinic (ed.) · Walter Benjamin (quoted on waiting and boredom) · Karsten Harries (quoted on aesthetic experience and the terror of time) · (quoted, not paged: Marco Frascari, Mieke Bal, Sanford Kwinter, Mark Wigley — see log) Debates: truth-and-illusion — the drawing as "atmosphere simulator" and historical knowledge "located somewhere between fact and fiction" Related source notes: Manack — Fabricating interiority — the Reader's chapters bracketing interiority as fabrication vs. interiority as suspension: Manack's interiority is manufactured, Hedges's is held in a room that "has held it for a while"; Hollis — (Re)constructing Histories — Hedges's "historical knowledge as an ongoing reconstruction… between fact and fiction" is the interior-historiographic method Hollis theorizes ("a (re)construction of preexisting structures") practiced on a single drawing; Borden — Thick Edge — Borden's in-between zone urban ("a five metre deep in-between zone"), Hedges's interior: the waiting room as the thick edge's indoor instance; Taylor — Shape shifting — Taylor's supermodern non-place train station vs. Hedges's thickened waiting room: two stations, two temporalities; Teston — Politicizing the interior — Teston's "liminal zone" disciplinary frontier vs. Hedges's limbo-room: liminality at the scale of the room; Qureshi — Spatial therapies — both chapters treat the discipline's temporality (past-present-future), but where Qureshi designs the connection, Hedges draws and lingers in it; Croft — Movement and Myth — two station-scale modern-era interiors read against obsolescence and control.

Direct Quotes

Page numbers are not available in the chapter text; quotes are located by section. Quotes Hedges takes from other authors are marked with the page numbers given in her notes.

"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" (Howard Nemerov, epigraph)

"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." (opening)

"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." (opening, after Bal)

"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" (opening)

"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." (opening)

"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." (opening, citing Harries)

"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." (opening)

"Waiting is a common human experience. Often the impression it conveys is one of anxiety, boredom, and anonymity." (The waiting room and the waiting drawing)

"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." (The waiting room and the waiting drawing)

"waiting is in a sense the well-varnished interior of boredom, that rather than pass the time, one must invite it in." (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 107, quoted)

"Finally, the third type: he who waits. He takes in the time and renders it up in altered form – that of expectation." (Benjamin, p. 107, quoted)

"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.'" (via Rolleston, quoted)

"the pause as the moment in a waiting room before entering or moving to another in which the narrative remains stationary… a disruption to the flow of time and function, and a silence in the construction of the narrative." (Mieke Bal, after p. 108, quoted)

"Expecting an imminent arrival or departure at an indicated time, timetables become links between the present and the future." (The waiting room and the waiting drawing)

"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." (Waiting drawing and the waiting detail)

"Making the drawing becomes a way of seeing time; a spatializing of time." (Waiting drawing and the waiting detail)

"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." (Marco Frascari, "Lines as Architectural Thinking," p. 201, quoted)

"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." (Frascari, quoted)

"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." (Waiting drawing and the waiting detail)

"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." (The ladies' waiting room)

"The concourse and its adjoining waiting rooms at the edge of the city appear unfamiliar and unhomely." (The ladies' waiting room)

"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" (The ladies' waiting room)

"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." (The ladies' waiting room)

"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 ladies' waiting room)

"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 ladies' waiting room)

"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." (The ladies' waiting room)

"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 ladies' waiting room)

"The room is caught between different scaled times and spaces. They meet one another in pockets of unrelated and ephemeral interiorities." (The ladies' waiting room)

"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 ladies' waiting room)

"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." (Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time, p. 21, quoted)

"There are sixty-two clocks in the station, all controlled from one master clock in the stationmaster's room… Clocks, indeed, are all over the place, and one has scarcely to turn one's head to see the time." (W.R. Davidson, 1927, quoted)

"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." (Kwinter, p. 36, quoted)

"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?" (Waiting drawings)

"The waiting room, like many interiors, is transient, subject to fashion and impermanent materials, to short lives with frequent renovation." (Waiting drawings)

"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." (Mark Wigley, after "The Architecture of Atmosphere," quoted)

"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." (Waiting drawings)

"a swirling manifold of circuitry, switching points and deterritorialized, non-grounded flows" (quoted, unattributed, on the station's conceived use)

"the waiting line representing a surface that has remained still while the neighboring interiors have shifted." (Waiting drawings)

"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." (What of the waiting room?)

"The ladies' waiting room still conjures a scene where absence becomes the room's principle feature." (What of the waiting room?)

"The empty room and somewhat deserted building offer a drought of sound, an aural desert where light enters unobserved over unburdened chairs." (What of the waiting room?)

"The waiting room has an unwitnessed existence; walls, ceilings, doors, and windows are cupped around a space and have held it for a while." (What of the waiting room?)

"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." (closing)

"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." (closing)

"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." (Marco Frascari, "Plans" (1988), p. 97, quoted)

Open Questions

Is the waiting room a type (a room program: ladies' waiting room, general waiting room) or a condition (any room in which waiting occurs)? Hedges's examples span both — can a corridor, a vestibule, a threshold "wait"?
Benjamin's "he who waits… takes in the time and renders it up in altered form – that of expectation": is expectation an architectural program at all, or is the waiting room precisely the building's admission that it cannot design time — only hold it?
The chapter reads the ladies' waiting room — the one sheet singled out of seventy-eight is the women's room. Is the waiting drawing's subject therefore gendered waiting (waiting as the condition historically assigned to women in transit), and what would the general waiting room's sheet have shown?
If "drawings are atmosphere simulators," what is the relation between the drawing's atmosphere and the room's? Sheet No. 24 records a room whose "surfaces emanat[e] the atmosphere of its past" — does the drawing simulate the room, the past, or the waiting?
The waiting room "renders itself uninhabitable" in the Harries sense — aesthetic experience "as if it had no duration." Is uninhabitability the waiting room's failure (cf. aesthetic-boredom's absence of inhabitability) or its precise program — the room that must not be dwelt in, only waited in?
After the conversion to student accommodation: "What has been lost?" Is the waiting room's unwitnessed emptiness ("an unwitnessed existence") the loss itself, or the only state in which the room can still be what it was — a room for waiting that no longer waits for anything?