Third Places

"This week, a study module on 'Third Places' took me back to my college days. I went to Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. The university had a small urban campus with tree-lined streets, and a central open field enclosed by department buildings. We had ample places to socialize, starting from several 'canteens' on campus to in-campus ponds and bookstores. However, the 'third place' I remember most vividly is the gaachtola. Literally, the word translates to 'under tree,' or something close enough, but for many of us Jadavpurians, it was packed with much more meaning. As I mentioned, our campus had innumerable trees, and sitting on a platform under them was a common tradition unless except on particularly rainy days. However, the word gaachhtola almost always referred to a particular landscape element outside of a particular canteen consisting of a circular wall filled with earth and planted with colorful shrubs. It's so strange to look back now only to see that our gaachhtola did not have a tree at all!

There were certain characteristics that helped this particular spot stand out. It was conveniently located at a nexus of the academic buildings and the canteen and field, thus occupying a 'middle ground' for the campus' consciousness. It provided good visibility; one could easily sit there alone and be able to watch the ongoing matches on the field or spot a friend walking down the street. The campus mostly had mid-rise buildings upto five storeys high, so the surrounding enclosure was tuned to a human scale. The gaachhtola also had certain characteristics that a trained architect's eyes would look at with scorn. It had a convex shape, radiating outwards in a circle in a way we were taught should have pushed people out instead of pulling them in. But that did not happen in practice. Instead, the convex shape helped people divide it up in parcels to serve their groups, the planting in the center serving to create some privacy from the groups interacting on the other side.

The photograph below is the only photo I have which gives a glimpse of the gaachhtola. It shows me and my friends playing Holi at the gaachhtola. If you look closely you see the canteen in the background as well as the shrubs I mentioned. For this blog post, I asked my friends if they had any pictures and most of them echoed my sentiment which is that this was a place we so took for granted, it never even occurred to us to document it. Our post class tête-à-tête , the sharing of plates full of chilli chicken and samosas, the street plays performed by the university drama groups, the campus politicians' calls to protest, the awkward encounters with faculty--they all live in our memory and nowhere else.

Fortunately, my architecture professor's seemed to be better clued into the value of the gaachhtola as a place of note. My first design assignment ever was to design to design a pavilion around it. This week's reading, however, got me thinking--does the gaachhtola really need more built forms to support it? From the reading, I somehow started picturing the 'third' place' as an indoor space with a specific primary purpose, such as a pub or club. The gaachhtola was obviously much simpler. In essence, it was just some planting amidst buildings that were going to be erected anyways! Examples like this show that the 'third place' often doesn't need to be 'designed' in the rather complicated architect sense of the word. Instead, it can exist without 'buildings' and be the result of the adoption of a spot with accidental merit as a 'place.' Today, the call to action for architects may just be to NOT BUILD. We should therefore study the accidental 'third places' of the contemporary world and trust the users of our designs to make their own meanings out of what we give them.