BETWIXT: Liminal Architecture of the Everyday
I am an experienced architect and creative director with over a decade of professional practice, blending architectural design, research, and event curation. Over the past four years, I have organized the Industrial Heritage Days lecture series, hosting lectures and a panel discussion each summer to engage communities and professionals in exploring industrial architecture and its cultural significance.
For the last few years on parallel to my architecture practice I have worked as a creative director at Provodņiks, where I lead creative teams and curate events that bridge architecture, art, and public engagement. My architectural experience includes contributing to the Riga Waterfront redevelopment project at Sarma & Norde Architects, where I am helping to transform a former industrial zone into a vibrant mixed-use development.
My interests lie at the intersection of spatial narrative, liminality, and the emotional atmospheres of everyday and industrial spaces, using speculative methods and emerging technologies to question and reimagine architectural experiences.
BETWIXT is a visual and conceptual investigation into liminal architecture embedded within the everyday. Set across a series of environments, the project explores how ordinary, hyperfunctional spaces can become emotionally disorienting, culturally charged, and strangely unreal.
BETWIXT: Liminal Architecture of the Everyday was initiated as a response to my growing interest in the overlooked, transient, and in-between spaces that permeate our daily experience - shops, playgrounds, casinos, schools, airports. Often dismissed as merely functional, these spaces hold deep cultural, psychological, and philosophical resonance. Drawing on thinkers such as Marc Augé (non-places), Victor Turner (liminality), Mark Fisher (the weird and the eerie), and Georges Perec (the infra-ordinary), I sought to reframe these everyday sites as vessels of ambiguity, transformation, and speculative potential.
The project emerged from a desire to question the dominance of monumental, photogenic architecture and instead direct focus towards the atmospheres and rituals embedded in these marginal yet omnipresent spatial typologies.
The work was developed through a combination of theoretical research, observational fieldwork, and speculative visual storytelling. Using AI image generation tools (like Midjourney) allowed for critical play - not to create perfect visualizations, but to provoke questions about perception, normativity, and the subtle poetics of the built environment. Each typology (shop, playground, casino, school, airport) was treated as a case study through which liminality could be explored: How do these spaces transition between public and private, real and staged, regulated and improvised? What temporalities and behaviors do they encode? Where do they slip into the eerie, the absurd, or the non-functional? One of the most successful aspects is how the work opens a speculative space for re-seeing the ordinary.