A new boulevard of nearly identical two-storey houses in a repetitive color palette, sat upon rolling hills, at the edge of Richmond, Kentucky. Referred to online as ‘Copy-Paste’ and ‘Barbie’ houses, this neighbourhood looks finished and not yet lived-in at the same time.
John Portman’s 1985 downtown hotel, built around one of the tallest hotel atriums in the world: a hollow tower of balconies, glass lifts and a drop that feels almost outdoor.
Eero Saarinen’s 1962 TWA terminal at JFK, restored as a hotel: blood red carpets, stark white tube corridors, a sunken lounge, and the feeling of a departure hall that never fully emptied.
A large 1970s regional mall that has become a classic example of a quietly fading American shopping center, with long empty corridors, vacant store fronts and an intense liminal atmosphere.
A now-defunct mid-century hotel in Troy, Michigan, whose empty corridors, dated décor and institutional atmosphere made it a popular real-world visual stand-in for Backrooms Level 5 “Terror Hotel”.
A labyrinthine house of open courtyards and narrow sheltered spaces set high in Lisbon’s Alfama district, where medieval walls meet contemporary restraint and one patio is filled with water, creating a liminal sequence of outdoor rooms under the open sky.
An underground 1950s pedestrian arcade of salmon-pink tiles, black granite columns and art-deco shopfronts that runs beneath Flinders Street, creating one of Melbourne’s most distinctive liminal and time-warp spaces.
Stranded on the California–Nevada border, this large casino resort often runs at strikingly low occupancy. Empty parking lots stretch into the desert, and the scale of the public spaces compared with the number of guests creates an unsettling, yet nostalgic sense of a place caught between its intended glamour and quiet decline; like a “forgotten mini-Vegas”, constantly in limbo.
A classic late-1960s shopping mall still in operation, but feels increasingly suspended in time with long quiet corridors, numerous vacant store fronts, residual 90s décor, and the soft echo of a once-busy retail past.
