Intermediate Spaces: The Threshold That Holds Domestic Life
A few days ago I came across one of our projects again, one that has been lived in for a while now. I wasn’t there to review the design. I was there to see how the family had claimed a space that, on the drawings, barely had a name.
It was the corridor between the living room and the back patio. A passage space, technically. But I found chairs there, plants, a low table, the children’s shoes lined up at the edge. The family had turned a threshold into another room.
This wasn’t a surprise. It’s something we had sensed for years in the studio, without ever being able to name it precisely. Intermediate spaces, the threshold, the corridor, the patio, the covered gallery, are not leftovers of the program. They are where domestic life actually happens.
The Finnish master Juhani Pallasmaa wrote about architecture as a bodily, multisensory experience rather than a purely visual one, about how we inhabit buildings with the whole body before we inhabit them with the eye. Reading him confirmed something we already knew from direct observation, more than it taught us from scratch.
The same happened with the idea of atmosphere as a quality built between light, material and time, rather than an effect added at the end. We had seen that idea before too, in the way a family chooses to sit in the corridor instead of the formal living room.
These intermediate spaces rarely photograph well. They don’t have a clear name in the architectural program. And yet, in every project we revisit years after handover, they are the first places where life settles in.
This isn’t only a domestic observation. The same question repeats at another scale, in a station, a market, a civic square. The space between buildings, the one that doesn’t fully belong to either program, is often what carries urban quality of life.
It’s the same logic behind our work on the IQOL index, urban quality of life isn’t measured only in the spaces with a name and an assigned function, but in how the spaces in between are inhabited. It’s also the question we bring to PolisMaker Lab at Politecnico di Milano, where we study how to design cities starting from these thresholds, not despite them.
Designing domestic space well, at this precise scale, is where a people-centred city begins to take shape.