Third Spaces Shoot
TEXT
I got into the idea of third spaces because of a severe lack of them back home. Life in Manila, for a certain part of society, can be a very immobile life, in some aspects. One moves from place to place in a car, which is very isolating. And it's not a quick journey - the traffic levels in Metro Manila are so insane, one must frequently allot at least two hours per day sitting in the traffic. This is two hours of practical idleness, when it could be spent doing more productive things like working out, socializing, or creating.
Project 1: The Adaptive Canvas
Focus: Creative ways third spaces are repurposed and informally claimed. This series explores how citizens appropriate non-traditional or single-use urban infrastructure to create spontaneous community hubs.
Key Barcelona Locations:
MACBA Plaza (Plaça dels Àngels): Designed as a sleek museum forecourt, transformed by skaters, dancers, and youth into an international open-air living room.
Superilles (Superblocks - Sant Antoni & Poblenou): Former traffic intersections reclaimed as pedestrian plazas, playgrounds, and chess spots.
Jardins de les Tres Xemeneies (Poble-sec): Industrial concrete slabs reinvented as urban art canvases, breakdancing spots, and graffiti workshops.
Visual Strategy: Wide-angle environmental portraits capturing the interplay between rigid architecture and fluid human activity. Shoot from elevated angles to emphasize how people map out their own mini-territories on flat urban surfaces.
Project 2: Industrial Rebirth
Focus: How third spaces have changed over time (past vs. present).
This project traces the historical evolution of Barcelona's third spaces, specifically how 19th- and 20th-century industrial complexes—once symbols of labor and production—have been transformed into spaces for leisure, art, and neighborhood assembly.
Key Barcelona Locations:
Can Batlló (Sants): A massive former textile factory self-managed by the local community into a library, workshop, climbing gym, and event hall.
Nau Bostik (La Sagrera): A former glue factory converted into a neighborhood street-art and cultural center.
Fabra i Coats (Sant Andreu): A sprawling thread factory converted into a multi-disciplinary art center and civic space.
Regional Travel Option: Colònia Güell (Santa Coloma de Cervelló), exploring how historic company-town gathering spaces compare to modern urban collectives.
Visual Strategy: Focus on architectural juxtaposition. Frame modern social interactions within vintage industrial framing—exposed brick, rusty beams, and saw-tooth roofs. Use warm lighting during community gatherings against cold, historic stone.
Project 3: The Modern Civic Sanctuary
Focus: What existing third spaces can do to adapt to today's public.
This concept investigates how traditional public institutions (libraries, markets, civic centers) are reinventing themselves to address modern needs: digital connectivity, remote work, thermal comfort during heatwaves, climate resilience, and intergenerational integration.
Key Barcelona Locations:
Biblioteca Gabriel García Márquez (Sant Martí): A world-class model of modern library architecture functioning as a hybrid lounge, workplace, podcast studio, and sensory room.
Centres Cívics (e.g., Can Deu in Les Corts or Casa Golferichs in Eixample): Historic estate homes turned municipal community spaces offering workshops, gardens, and affordable cafes.
Climate Shelters (Refugis Climàtics): Municipal public parks, indoor plazas, and schoolyards repurposed with shade, water, and greenery to protect citizens during summer extremes.
Visual Strategy: Focus on interior details, light, and interaction. Contrast digital screens with physical gathering, and highlight accessible design elements like seamless ramps, open wooden seating, and climate-control features.
Project 4: The Vanishing Casal vs. The Digital Hub
Focus: The tension between traditional local gathering spaces and modern hybrid third spaces.
A comparative visual study examining legacy third spaces rooted in local neighborhood identity versus modern, globalized third spaces built around flexibility and digital culture.
| Space Type | Barcelona Examples | Visual Themes |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional / Neighborhood | Historic Casals Populars, traditional Ateneus, neighborhood vermut bars (e.g., in Gràcia or Sants). | Framed photos on walls, older patrons, analog textures, tight community familiarity, low lighting. |
| Modern / Hybrid | Specialty coffee shops with co-working policies, open-source maker spaces, hybrid bookstore-cafes. | Minimalist decor, laptop screens, international crowds, glass, natural light, high mobility. |
- Visual Strategy: Shoot in diptychs (side-by-side pairings). Pair a shot of a traditional card game at an ateneu with a laptop-centric table at a modern specialty coffee shop to highlight shifting forms of connection.
Execution & Narrative Approaches
Time-Slice Series: Position a camera on a tripod in a single location (like a Superilla or a civic center courtyard) for 12 hours. Take photos every hour to document how the space mutates from a morning dog-walking spot to an afternoon playground and an evening social lounge.
Detail & Signage Focus: Document the "rules" vs. the "reality" of public space—photograph official signboards prohibiting activities alongside photos of people creatively breaking those rules to make the space usable.
Project 5: Micro-Geographies of the Plaza (Differential Use vs. Shared Ground)
Focus: How different cultural groups occupy the exact same physical footprint in culturally distinct ways throughout the day.
Barcelona's high-density urban fabric creates "micro-geographies" where distinct cultures carve out their own niches within a single square block.
Key Barcelona Locations:
Rambla del Raval: Moroccan and Pakistani men gathering at outdoor tea spots, North American and European digital nomads working at modern cafe terraces, and local children of all backgrounds playing around Fernando Botero's El Gat sculpture.
Plaça dels Àngels (MACBA): Global street-skate culture interacting with local South Asian youth playing cricket against museum walls and tourists sitting on the perimeter steps.
Plaça de Sant Agustí: A transition zone where West African, North African, and Filipino residents use stone ledges and trees for shade, social gathering, and informal commerce.
Visual Strategy: Stationary Framing. Set up a fixed tripod composition at a single plaza during three distinct times of day (morning, afternoon, evening). Document how the demographic, body language, and spatial arrangement shift dramatically while the physical architecture remains static.
Project 6: Universal Rituals, Diverse Expressions
Focus: Visualizing universal human needs—eating, resting, play, and celebration—to highlight cultural similarities alongside unique cultural expressions.
This series uses thematic pairing to show that while cultural expression varies, the underlying human desire for connection in a third space is identical.
| Universal Human Ritual | Cultural Expression A | Cultural Expression B | Barcelona Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gathering over Food/Drink | Catalan vermut hour at traditional neighborhood corner bars. | Pakistani chai groups or Maghrebi mint tea gatherings on public benches. | Carrer de Sant Pau & Poble-sec |
| Public Play & Sport | Latin American Ecuavóley (Ecuadorian volleyball) or football matches. | Mediterranean petanca (bocce) played by elderly local residents. | Parc de la Espanya Industrial / Parc de la Clota |
| Intergenerational Care | Grandparents walking toddlers in quiet residential park enclosures. | Multigenerational family picnics sprawling across green lawns. | Parc de la Ciutadella / Parc Central de Nou Barris |
- Visual Strategy: Diptych Pairings. Display images side-by-side. Left frame: One culture engaging in a ritual. Right frame: Another culture engaging in the exact same ritual. Highlight identical body language, hand gestures, and emotional expressions across different cultural contexts.
Project 7: Contact Zones & Cultural Fusion
Focus: Spaces specifically designed—or naturally adapted—to encourage intercultural dialogue, collaboration, and the merging of cultural practices.
Rather than looking at cultures operating in parallel, this concept targets the physical "friction points" where cultures overlap, collaborate, and form hybrid third spaces.
Key Barcelona Locations:
Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu Courtyard: A historic 15th-century Gothic courtyard serving as a shared peaceful sanctuary where elderly neighborhood residents, university students, and recent immigrants sit together under orange trees.
Mercat dels Encants (Glòries): An open-air covered mirror-roof market where haggling, trading, and browsing create an egalitarian space of cross-cultural economic and social interaction.
Casals de Barri & Community Kitchens (e.g., Casal de Barri Folch i Torres in Raval or Can Basté in Nou Barris): Municipal spaces hosting intercultural cooking workshops, community gardens, and joint neighborhood assemblies.
Visual Strategy: Medium & Tight Interpersonal Shots. Capture moments of direct eye contact, handoffs (exchanging goods, food, or tools), overlapping shadows, and shared laughter between people of different backgrounds. Focus on light and shadow to visually connect figures within the frame.
Project 8: The Shared Bench (Minimalist Portraiture)
Focus: A tight, conceptual study of the public bench as the ultimate democratic equalizer in modern global cities.
A street bench requires no financial transaction to occupy, making it the primary third space where cultural proximity occurs naturally.
Key Barcelona Locations:
Passeig de Lluís Companys: Wide promenade lined with decorative benches hosting a constant rotation of global citizens.
Parc del Clot & Parc de Can Dragó: Urban parks in multicultural neighborhoods featuring long continuous seating areas.
Visual Strategy: Consistent Eye-Level Street Portraiture. Frame every shot identically: a straight-on profile or frontal view of a single park bench. Document who sits next to whom—a Bangladeshi teenager next to a retired Catalan woman, or a Senegalese vendor next to a French tourist—focusing on the silent proximity and shared atmosphere of the bench.