Architectural Third Spaces

Akhila Pentrala

Office-home. Home-office.
Our world oscillates between these two. Our mind operates accordingly in
these two zones. Our habits are oriented to these spaces.
In his book is space political? Fredric Jameson mention about considering
another mode of thinking but in such a way that it doesn’t lapse into a linguistic
or semiotic view of architecture.1
E. Soja proposed a different way of thinking about space and spatiality. He
stated that the first and second spaces are two different, and possibly
conflicting, spatial groupings where people interact physically and socially: such
as home (everyday knowledge) and school (academic knowledge) where as
third spaces are the in-between, or hybrid, spaces, where the first and second
spaces work together to generate a new third space.2
Rethinking this spatial theory would help in our present day while providing a
historical step and raising questions as to whether built space is a form of
language and question the condition of possibility of spatial form.2
The first space is techniqually the inside since that is what we create first or
intend to create and the space we demarcate it from is the outside, here we
consider the third space to be this common space but we forget the part of
space which the materials occupy. This could be the third space in a building.
Edward Soja derives the term thirdspace (as a single word) from Henri Lefebvre
as the space in habited by an other or outsider. Various hegemonies, according
to Soja, enforce a space that is peripheral, outside and away from the centre.
Homi.J.Bhabha ,” The space of self and other is an inside (self) and an outside
(other). Third space is the space of the in-between inside and outside. It is the
space of that which is undefined, the space that presents itself, as a surface.
This is a generating machine for culture that renews and subverts. Using it to
explain post colonialism as an elusive cultural function persistently eluding
and subverting the subliminal image of the cultural centre.”
How do we interpret this third space today?
Is it in art or is it just an expression, can it be bought to the foreground and have
a face and how has it emerged overtime
Third spaces can be the sites where one’s identity is merged with the context
itself.

1 Fredric Jameson, Is Space Political? in Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture:

A reader in cultural theory, Routledge, 1997, pp. 255-69.
2 Fredric Jameson, Is Space Political? in Neil Leach, Rethinking Architecture:
A reader in cultural theory ,Routledge, 1997, p. 261.