Author: Santiago Vejar
Architect specialized in urban planning and OT. Writer and founder of ARQritic.
The images you are about to see have a series of peculiarities in common, they are places that produce enormous mistrust, insecurity, claustrophobia and even panic, they are places very similar to recognizable and everyday places: offices, parking lots, basements, living rooms waiting areas, departments, play centers, among others. These liminal places were reinterpreted by internet users. Today we will take on the task of analyzing backrooms: the architecture of discomfort.
The backrooms are a series of creepypastas (horror stories originating on the Internet) whose purpose is to cause discomfort in the viewer through the experimentation of liminal, labyrinthine spaces with endless levels.
Its story dates back to 2018. On the 4chan website, a user asked the community to share images that simply “felt strange.” Someone else uploaded the slightly tilted photograph of a poorly lit room; Months later, a user commented on the image narrating the first backroom creepypasta.
The images can be renderings or analog photographs of common places with a deeply uncomfortable and disturbing atmosphere, although over time users added monsters and multiple levels to the stories, since its inception this typology of creepypastas has emphasized the control that architecture and the atmosphere of space exerts on the user. Surely all of us at some point in our childhood encounter a liminal space that backrooms remind us of, whether it be a hospital, a school or parking lot, a department store, or even a particular home.
The reason why the images of this type of spaces concern us so much are concentrated in various factors: they are closed places, with poor lighting, absent of contact or reference with the outside and, therefore, disorienting. They are places where we see the traditional reticular ceiling, upholstered walls and carpeted floor. The proportions are uncomfortable, the spaces are confusing, labyrinthine, repetitive, inorganic, in short, inhuman.
We have noticed that the stylistic typology to which this type of spaces alludes is the so-called international style, the one that comes from functionalism and rationalism and which architects in the mid-20th century sought to establish throughout the world. Currently we can identify this and its characteristics in buildings that are already inhuman and monotonous: office buildings with small cubicles, serial housing, departmental buildings, shopping centers, subway stations, parking lots, among others.
The fact that these types of scenarios are so susceptible to encountering them leaves us with a lesson: architecture can be more than terrifying, it can be uncomfortable when it is cold and rational, produced without the slightest trace of the search for emotional provocation and comfort, when it distances itself from the human from his basic activity of inhabiting the world.
Facing architecture of this type produces in the viewer an aesthetic experience based on the feeling of impropriety and strangeness with the space and the situation. For the human as content, being alien to his container implies the retention of his will. To be in front of an architectural space, whatever it may be, is to find yourself in front of an artifice, a product of the human hand, there is nothing in nature that resembles it. Now, if this emphasizes on this, the space appropriates the individual and will invalidate the human condition with its rational functionality and its coldness, it will be finding oneself within a scenario that repels and dedignifies, where the identity of the subject becomes breakable and where in There is nothing in the situation that surrounds him that shows his value.
Have you found yourself anywhere like this?
What elements do you identify in them?
We would like to know your opinion about what these types of places tell us about the work of architecture.