The Anomaly Room
Odd rooms, private collections and the stories they keep
Rooms

The rooms nobody assigned a purpose

Every large building has one, and what happens to it says more than the floor plan does.

Draw any big building and you will leave a space over: too narrow for an office, too wide for a cupboard, wrongly lit for anything. Architects call them residual. Everyone else calls them the room at the end.

What fills them is never planned. A chair and a kettle. Two decades of stacked chairs. In one hospital we visited, the residual room had quietly become the only place staff could cry without being seen, and the building had reorganised itself around that.

When a refurbishment finally assigns the space a function, the function rarely sticks. The building seems to want its leftover back.

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