Behind The Scenes Architecture

We're in the era of backrooms.

It's funny how a blurry image of an empty office corridor can make thousands of people uneasy. The internet has spent years obsessing over liminal spaces, places that feel vaguely familiar but somehow wrong. An abandoned mall. A hotel hallway that never seems to end. A classroom after everyone has gone home.

But recently I found myself drawn to a different kind of space. Not spaces that feel almost human, but spaces that feel entirely indifferent to us. I went down a rabbit hole looking at the backstage worlds hidden behind everyday experiences: the mechanical guts of a bowling alley where pins are violently reset over and over again, the inside of an airplane before the seats are installed, theatre fly towers filled with ropes, catwalks and lighting rigs, theme park ride systems stripped of their fantasy facades. Places we're never really meant to see.

What's fascinating is that these spaces don't even try to make us comfortable. They aren't designed around human scale, human movement, or even human experience. They exist purely to perform a task. They're machines disguised as architecture.

A hotel lobby wants to welcome you. A living room wants to comfort you. A city street wants to orient you. These spaces want nothing. Maybe that's why they feel so strange.

Unlike liminal spaces, which create discomfort through a distorted sense of familiarity, these environments are unsettling because they reject familiarity altogether. Exposed steel, endless cables, concrete chambers, maintenance tunnels, service voids. They feel almost dystopian, like glimpses into a version of the world operating without us.

And yet I don't find them as unsettling as the backrooms. There's something honest about them. They aren't pretending to be places for people. They don't create the uncanny feeling of almost belonging. They're simply infrastructure, functioning exactly as intended. Too real. Almost overwhelming in how direct it is.

It makes me wonder how much of our understanding of reality comes from architectural illusion. We're surrounded by spaces carefully designed to feel intuitive, welcoming, and familiar. Remove that layer, and the world starts to look very different.

These are some of the spaces I had a lot of fun researching:

Super Kamiokande Neutrino Observatory, Japan

Airport Luggage Distribution System

Airplane without seats

Behind a Bowling Alley

Taipei 101 Mass Damper

Yick Cheong Building and Montane Mansion, Hongkong

The Backside of a Theatre Stage

Lloyd's Building, London

Would I call this dystopian? Maybe? Some of them do feel more directly futuristic, while some still cater to everyday comfort although disguised as something more pleasant than it really is. Maybe it's a new form of architecture? A mix of Brutalism and High-Tech Architecture? The walking city is closer to being a reality than idea today, I am very curious to see if this will be a new era of architecture.

Are there anymore you can think of?

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