A waiting room is a space designed to be forgotten. No one decorates their memory with the chairs they sat in before a dentist appointment. And yet the experience of waiting — suspended, purposeless, slightly anxious — is one of the most universal human states.
I've been thinking about this since reading a short essay on liminal spaces — those transitional zones that exist between one state and another. Waiting rooms are the purest form of the liminal. You are not yet where you're going. You are no longer where you were. You are nowhere, briefly.
The design of waiting rooms reflects this. They are almost always generic. Chairs arranged in rows or around the perimeter. A table with magazines that are months old. Lighting that is neither warm nor cold. The aesthetic is deliberate non-aesthetic — a space that refuses to assert itself, because to assert itself would be to acknowledge that you are here, stuck, waiting.
There's something philosophically interesting about a space that is designed to be endured rather than experienced. Most designed spaces try to produce a feeling. Waiting rooms try to produce the absence of feeling — a neutral container for time that has to pass.
I think this is why the internet has become so interested in liminal aesthetics. We spend so much of our lives in transitional states — between jobs, between relationships, between versions of ourselves — that spaces which make that transition visible have a strange resonance.