As opposed to all the silly methods of creating non-symmetric plots in matplolib, i just found that this works!

gistfile1.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

x = np.arange(3)
y = x

plt.subplot(211)
plt.plot(x,x)
plt.subplot(223)
plt.plot(x,x)
plt.subplot(224)
plt.plot(x,x)
plt.show()