Welcome to the 7-1/2th Floor!
Liminal space, physical space, psychological space, and the "uncanny valley"
The Story
In the 1999 Movie, Being John Malkovich, Craig Schwartz, played by John Cusack, is an unemployed street puppeteer in New York City. He’s broke, so he applies for a job as a file clerk at a place called Lester Corp, and heads downtown for an interview with Dr. Lester, whose office is on the 7 ½ floor of the Mertin-Flemmer building. When Craig tells the elevator operator where he’s going, she waits until the elevator is between floors 7 and 8, and presses the emergency stop button—causing both numbers 7 and 8 to light up at the same time—and then she jams a crowbar between the two doors. These doors have marks from having been pried open before—and after she and pries them partway open, Craig ducks and steps out of the elevator and into a lobby with a really low ceiling. There is a directory, a couple of chairs, and a table with a plant on it, and Craig starts walking, hunched over, down a corridor that is like any other corridor in an office building except the ceiling is only 5’ off the floor. Craig enters the lobby of the Lester Corp office and sits in the cramped waiting area before being let in to see Dr. Lester, who, after a nonsensical conversation, offers Craig the job. A few days after starting work, Craig moves a file cabinet and discovers a small, low door in the wall. He opens the door and crawls into a round tunnel, and after getting about ten feet in, the door slams shut behind him. Then he is propelled through the tunnel, which begins to look more like a vessel in the body. When Craig comes to a stop, he is looking out of the eyes of the actor John Malkovich, who is sitting at home eating toast, drinking coffee, and reading the Wall Street Journal. Soon Malkovich leaves his apartment, takes the elevator down, and gets into a cab. Craig is seeing and hearing everything from Malkovich’s perspective as they drive through New York traffic when, suddenly, he is ejected from Malkovich’s mind, landing in a ditch along the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike, just outside the city. Although Craig Schwartz didn’t know it at the time, the 7 ½ floor, the tunnel, John Malkovich’s mind, and the New Jersey Turnpike are all examples of what is known as “liminal space.”
The Theory
Liminal Space: The word “liminal” comes from the Latin word limen, which means “threshold.” When he first coined the term “liminal space” in 1909, anthropologist and folklorist Arnold van Gennep was referring not to physical space but to the uncomfortable places in between what came before and what is coming next, like between adolescence and adulthood, pregnancy and childbirth, or the middle of a wedding ceremony, when you are not quite married yet.1 Neuroscientist and author Anne-Laure Le Cunff describes liminal space as,
“The middle phase of rites of passage, that ambiguous period when we leave an old identity behind but haven’t yet stepped into a new one.”2
Physical Space: In the 1960s and 70s, Victor Turner expanded upon van Gennep’s idea from the ritual to the aesthetic, to include the physical spaces where liminal experiences—transitions—took place, including architecture, infrastructure, and the built and natural environments. These were the “in between” spaces of both ambiguity and movement that you must pass through to get from one place to the next, and that make up the connective tissue of the buildings and cities. For Turner, liminal spaces include transportation facilities such as airport terminals, train stations, subway platforms, and parking garages; pedestrian connections including skyways, underpasses, stairwells, and alleys; commercial spaces like hotel corridors, shopping malls, and laundromats; and institutional environments like hospital waiting rooms and school hallways.3
Psychological Space: In addition to being spaces you must pass through, there are also liminal spaces that provoke an emotional or psychological reaction and feeling of discomfort. “Kenopsia” is the unsettling feeling you get when a place that is usually full of people is empty, for example, a subway platform or airport terminal late at night, vacant office space after a tenant has moved out, or a school classroom during summertime. Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of abstract empty urban plazas offer one example, and the Overlook Hotel, in the movie The Shining, offers another, where the vast public spaces—lobby, bar, dining room, and corridors—that are usually bustling with people, all feel empty, lifeless, and eerie when the hotel is closed for the season. Other examples of “kenoptic spaces” include empty parking garages and parking lots, empty streets at dawn, abandoned structures, construction sites, ruins, and places that have suffered disasters. Spaces without windows or natural daylight where you can’t tell the time of day can add to the feeling of kenopsia, for example, airport terminals and subway platforms at night. Liminal spaces and kenoptic spaces like this can feel alluring but more often trigger a sense of mystery, unease, discomfort, anonymity, eeriness, and creepiness, and leave us asking ourselves, “am I in the right place,” and “should I even be here?”4
The Uncanny Valley: There is one last way to think about liminal space. In a 1906 essay, German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch used the term “uncanny” to describe not knowing whether something is alive or inanimate. In 1919, Sigmund Freud expanded on Jentsch’s idea in an essay called “The Uncanny,” about repressed childhood fears returning in adulthood that lead to experiences like seeing ghosts or apparitions, seeing a double of oneself, having one’s thoughts influence outcomes in the real world, and seeing inanimate figures come alive. In 1970, robotics professor Masahiro Mori introduced the concept of “the uncanny valley” to describe the feeling of revulsion or disgust we get when a robot or facsimile of a face is not quite real, but real enough that it gives us the creeps. M3GAN, the murderous AI doll in the movie, is a great example—she looks very lifelike, but not enough so, and the subtle difference is what makes her so frightening. A recent study applied the uncanny valley model to architecture and found that there is a similar effect when a space has odd proportions, repetitive elements, out of scale elements, lack of features, unusual sizes of features, windows in odd locations, a lack of people, a lack of daylight, and visual occlusion—where views are blocked, increase the sense of unease and danger. The study found that people had a similar reaction to these “configural deviations in physical spaces” as to the human likenesses that inhabit the uncanny valley. Most recently, during COVID and since, the uncanny valley has come to include digital content—AI-generated avatars, deepfakes, or virtual influencers that look almost, but not quite—that provoke feelings of unease, revulsion, or fear.5
Not long after I started working for the City of Philadelphia, I asked if I could get some better office furniture—the stuff I had was in pretty poor shape. So, a guy from the department of Public Property took me down the elevator, out of the building, through a plaza, across a street, and into an old building where the city leased space. He pushed the down button on the elevator and, after we got in, he put a key into the elevator control panel, turned it, and pressed the button for the sub-basement. Below Philadelphia’s central business district, there is a vast system of underground space called the Concourse, which includes tunnels, stairs, and escalators that lead to and connect the commuter rail and trolley systems to the streets above, as well as newsstands, donut shops, and other class C retail shops. But some privately owned buildings also have below-grade space that extends under the streets, sidewalks, and plazas. When the elevator door opened, we walked into a vast, cavernous, and dimly lit space filled with old, used metal office furniture as far as the eye could see. It looked like that endless warehouse at the end of the movie, The Raiders of the Lost Ark, except instead of crates, it was just filled with desks, chairs, credenzas, tables, and file cabinets, all in colors from past decades – beige, black, and gray, as well as mint, teal, yellow, and green. Everything had little dings, dents, scratches, and sometimes patches of rust. This was where old office furniture went to die, and indeed, the place felt haunted by all the people who had used this furniture in the past. I got a cold feeling of “should I even be here,” followed by, “what would happen if I got stuck in here,” and then “let’s get the hell out of here!”
Instead of a Lesson, a Question
One of the most interesting things about liminal spaces is that we are so often attracted to them. We like the weird, slightly uncomfortable experience of being in a place when it feels like maybe we shouldn’t be there. One of my favorite liminal spaces is below the approach to the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Olde City, Philadelphia. The woman who cut my hair for seventeen years ran her shop from a rowhouse just north of the bridge. I used to love walking to her place, especially the last two blocks, when I could walk under the bridge approach, through a weird under-bridge space, listening to the rumbling of the tires of the cars and trucks on the deck above, as it rose higher and higher before reaching out to span over the Delaware River on the way to New Jersey.
What are your liminal spaces? Let me know—maybe I’ll talk about them in a future Mailbag Episode!
“Well, you know, Doc, when something happens, it can leave a trace of itself behind... I think a lot of things happened right here in this particular hotel over the years. And not all of ‘em was good.”
- Dick Hallorann, in The Shining
Meet you in Malkovich in one hour
- Maxine, in Being John Malkovich
Van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage. University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909.)
Le Cunff, Anne-Laure, “Why liminal spaces are your brain’s secret laboratory: Life’s ‘in-between’ stages pack unique cognitive benefits—if you know how to tap into them,” Big Think, 29 September 2025, https://bigthink.com/smart-skills/liminal-spaces-neuroscience/.
My thanks to Wikipedia for a summary of Victor Turner’s role in advancing Van Gennep’s theory of liminal space.
Fernandes, Valanne, “What is Liminal Space?,” in First in Architecture, https://www.firstinarchitecture.co.uk/what-is-liminal-space/. My thanks to Fernandes and her excellent introduction to the topics of liminal space, Arnold Van Gennep, Victor Turner, and other people and ideas. Her article helped me tremendously in framing this one.
Diel, Alexander, Michael Lewis, “Structural deviations drive an uncanny valley of physical places,” in Journal of Environmental Psychology, 82 (2022).