This visual essay was made during a trip to Bragança, in the north of Portugal on the Carnival holidays in 2018, and continued in the second trip in 2019. on our travels, I started to notice the small bus stops. Little houses, sometimes equipped with architectural features, such as windows, door, rooftop, fireplace, using the same construction materials as surrounding houses. Easily mistaken for one, and not highlighted for, the opposite happens in the cities. Most of the time they punctuate the landscape, become little landmarks, that scatter an architecture feature on the empty landscape.

 They became also the reflection of empty villages, undressed, and disconnected in time with the cities. The buses, may they pass, are unfrequent. This is not something new but it hit me as a photographer and architect to think about the placement, the history of their location and to whom they once served, and what do they signal for a future, with closer digital communication but less physical one.

This visual narrative or visual essay aims to show the emptiness of architectural structures that were once the physical connections between spaces, villages and people. In my mind, I still hope that they do connect in some way, or that they will still reconnect our mind to recollect how once the territory was attached. Somehow these architectural features, resembling in most cases households, with particular features such as fireplaces, benches, windows, roofs, chimneys, or even doors, were the extension of the local houses and a reflection of the traditional architecture. 

The bus stops were all empty at the time they were pictured. The photographic approach was aiming at the surroundings, enabling a broader capture of how they were placed within the territory and landscape, then as an individual architecture, then as an artistic object. Some were photographed twice.

Photography becomes and extended part of architecture, enabling the photographer to capture the different moments in which the architecture is ‘rooted’ to the environment, surroundings, and territory. It is of extraordinary importance to trace the evolution of the architecture through time and how it reacts to its surroundings. How inhabitants make use of it, sometimes using it to project and communicate amongst each other, it can in some places become more than ‘a’ bus stop. 

Maybe the bus stop part becomes insignificant, almost undetectable, missable, as some are designed to become part of houses, being camouflaged within it’s surrounding, only distinguished by its location, on the sidewalks, or close to a road.

Even its architectural design demonstrates what the needs, and what to expect, a fireplace, with closed front enunciates a rather long wait in the cold weather. 

So by the middle of this essay as a visual narrative, it became to me more an architectural essay on structures, rather than a compilation of bus stops. Actually it becomes almost invisible the usage of such ‘little houses’ if it weren’t for the signage. Some were for me quite easily mistaken with possible shelters during snow storms, or shepherd’s shelters. 

These visual studies are conjoined with landscape pictures, showing the surroundings, in most cases empty of people, houses or even nature. This is not a social portrait, since I did not find people in most compositions making use of only these architecture features, which would be a very compiling essay to do, since I can not imagine how long did I have to wait in other to see someone or even a bus passing by. I do question myself extremely often about spacial connection, transportation and communication with the inhabitants, should these architectural structures be dismantled since they do not serve their purpose, or the other hand they became landmarks for spacial orientation and travelling? 

Photography is a very important tool in architecture, not only is it the first way in which the architect can simulate a structural feature within its territory, but after its completion, is a valuable way of documenting it’s interaction with landscape and people. It became clear in this visual essay that there is missing the human factor/scale, to 1. give the proportion to the structures 2. testify its use. At the same time the absence of people also tells us the emptiness of the bus stops, the inexistent or rare use of them, but the appropriation of them as a communication point or a landmark, makes these small houses a part of the surroundings. This is an open essay.