Rooms for Being
We are taught to measure spaces by what they do: how many seats, how many desks, how many transactions per hour. Increasingly, architects are trained to choreograph flows and maximize throughput; in the gospel of productivity, a ‘good’ building is one that keeps people moving. But what if the most radical thing a space can do is invite us to stop?
There is a different metric hiding in plain sight, felt mostly in the quiet: a patch of warm sun on a stair, the generous corner of a library where two people become a circle of four, the threshold where a neighbour lingers with a bag of oranges because the steps are just the right height for conversation. These are not programmatic triumphs. They are spatial invitations to be. Unrushed. Unoptimized. Unguarded. Spatial theorists remind us that such invitations live in the realm of the lived and the representational – how bodies actually inhabit and remake space each day.[1]
The in-between as a site of liberation
Liminal spaces – thresholds, porches, stoops, alleys, courtyards, vestibules, nooks – are neither here nor there. They sit between the sanctioned zones of “use,” the places that can be counted on a schedule. Precisely because these spaces are in-between, they hold possibility: Victor Turner’s concept of liminality is a state of being ‘on the threshold,’ characterized by a breakdown of social hierarchy and the emergence of ‘communitas,’ a sense of unity and solidarity;[2] similarly bell hooks’ “margin as a space of radical openness,”[3] is where the script loosens, and another story can be told.
Liberation rarely arrives as a grand plaza or a perfect master plan. It is found in the small permissions: to rest, to loiter without purpose, to be recognized without having to perform. If we treat thresholds with intention, as commons, we shift from program to relation, making room for representational spaces where everyday practices can re-script control.[4] To design for being is to design for this looseness: for pause, drift, and informal, unscheduled encounter. It is to treat thresholds, not as leftover area, but as the moral centre of a place. Doreen Massey would call this stewarding our “throwntogetherness,” staging co-presence with care.[5]
Nooks as commons
A nook is a micro-common. It offers a back to lean against, a roof to hold the weather at bay, a modest boundary that says, “you are safe enough to let your shoulders drop.” A nook does not demand announcement; it is a whisper to come as you are. Across many contexts, what Ray Oldenburg called “third places” knit social life together – the informal settings beyond home and work where we return, are known, and practice low-stakes community.[6] Well-placed nooks act as third-place fragments within larger buildings and streetscapes. When we scatter such nooks across a school, clinic, housing block, waterfront, we are seeding belonging. Architecture begins to say: your unhurried self has a place here. Your grief has a shade tree. Your laughter has a windbreak. Your quiet can be held by this wall.
Being vs. doing (and why design must choose)
‘Doing’ is not the enemy; it feeds and shelters us. But a world organized only for doing is brittle. It punishes slowness and treats rest as inefficiency. In this world, exclusion hides inside logistics: who can linger, who must move, whose presence is allowed to take up space without justification. Scholarship on everyday life shows how people tactically reclaim room within those scripts (walking, lingering, repurposing) if only the environment allows it.[7] ‘Being’ restores the human scale. It is relational. It protects the right to arrive as a full person, not an instrument. It honours rest and joy as necessary conditions for dignity. And because power is spatial, liberation must also be spatial. This is not sentiment; it is a design agenda.
Design as the practice of permission
To design for being is to script permission into the built environment:
Permission to pause. Edges that invite leaning, steps that welcome sitting, ledges that say ‘stay.’ A ceiling that lowers slightly, a seat with a back, a corner that softens glare.
Permission to feel. Materials and acoustics that soften the world so we can see and hear ourselves again. shade in summer, sun in winter. Dappled light that moves through the day, a breeze that turns pause into pleasure.
Permission to meet. Sightlines that catch someone’s eye kindly; small rooms that seat three without apology; courtyards scaled to a conversation. Micro third-places embedded in circulation. Surfaces of different heights and depths: a place for an elder’s careful descent, the toddler’s climb, the teenager’s lean.
Permission to return. A nook that is felt in the body; the same patch of light, season after season; place made through ongoing encounters. Plants tended by many hands, a kettle in reach, chalk for children.
When permission accumulates, belonging emerges. People begin to claim the space as ‘ours,’ not because a plaque says so, but because the space keeps saying yes to their being, to their showing up, to their relations.
Pace as a form of care
Speed is a spatial politics: when plans push only for efficiency, the first thing squeezed out is the time to be together. Designing pace into places – routes that meander, thresholds that thicken, corners that catch – creates the conditions for friendliness and community. Consider the ‘extra’ metre carved from a corridor to create a seat by a window. The budget might call it waste. Over years, it becomes a place where a parent steadies before an appointment, or where students trade notes, or where someone whispers a prayer. That metre pays back in resilience we can’t spreadsheet.
From belonging to stewardship
When people feel permitted to be, they begin to take responsibility. Belonging is not a feeling we deliver; it is a relationship we host. In well-held in-between spaces, someone picks up the broom without being asked. Another waters the plants. A third brings in a thermos and stays an hour longer than planned. Stewardship grows where being has been honoured. Placemaking is the act of ongoing, collective making.[8]
Practicing ‘being’ in our work
At Lemon Papaya, our method is simple and stubborn: we sit with people in the in-between. We ask where their shoulders drop, where their voices soften, where they already gather without permission. We map those micro-commons and then widen them, materially, socially, politically. We treat the nook as an instrument of spatial justice. We trade control for collaboration. We design so that participation is not an event but a place you can always return to.
In a world that worships doing, being is a form of quiet resistance. If you are ready to centre being in your project, let’s chat.
[1] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
[2] Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969).
[3] bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” Framework 36 (1989): 15-23.
[4] Lefebvre, The Production of Space.
[5] Doreen Massey, For Space (London: SAGE, 2005).
[6] Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place; Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York: Paragon House, 1989).
[7] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
[8] Massey, For Space.