There are spaces where we don’t do anything worth much. We just wait or try to, while we waste away the time between important activities. These are the waiting rooms at doctor’s offices, government offices, airports, and company offices. Here it seems architecture dissolves. These are the places where we do virtually nothing. We have to create personal cocoons for ourselves, either through meditation or the use of technology. And in those cocoons, all boundaries seem to disappear.

As it turns out, the amount of time we spend in such limbo spaces increases by the year. The question is, therefore, becoming more pertinent about how such areas should be designed and what they tell us about where architecture is going in the future.

At first, we might not make much of such spaces. There isn’t usually a focus to them, and the architectural elements do not have much in the way of hierarchy. We don’t even always know whether we’re in a hallway or a room.

But if we think a little harder about it, these spaces have a particular beauty to them. They are almost there and at the same time not quite there. They are purposeless, and yet beauty can be found there as well. Throughout the history of architecture, spaces have been designed to fulfill specific purposes. From the structure to the subtle lighting, it’s always been to support some purpose. It could be eating, working, sleeping or some other use, but the great constant is that there is still some purpose.

There have always been in-between spaces, of course, but they have always seemed like the abandoned children of architecture, making you feel at once as if you are both at home and not quite there. However, in the recent few decades, that has changed. They have grown into something of their own. From waiting rooms to semi-public and café spaces, they have become more of a limbo space than, say, a Roman bath or the foyer of a theater.

Technology has had a significant effect on such spaces. Creating something of a personal bubble. They are neither private spaces, nor public ones, but something that lies somewhere in-between. Consider the fact that they typically have some shared music, but the people occupying this common space with us are now busy chatting away on social media on their phones. We are connected but disconnected. We are there but profoundly distracted. The way technology has enabled this living embodiment of contradictions seems to have escaped the attention of architects until now.

Here there is plenty of opportunity for an architect.

We could, on the one hand, look at the way we treat such spaces where we’re spending a large chunk of our time, but which are rather dreadful spaces. They present the opportunity for innovation as far as their function and experience are concerned.

On the other hand, we can accept them as they are and make them more suitable to their purposeful purposelessness. They can help us come up with a whole new class of architectural design concepts centered around the contradictory bubble that is being there and not being there simultaneously.

Where is your favorite and least favorite purposeful-purposelessness place?