Marianna Charitonidou, “The Balcony as An Urban Element: Threshold, Common World and Rythmanalysis”, SToA Stuttgart Talks: Facing Covid-19 – (Politics of) Elements of Architecture (2020), Stuttgart, Germany, May 20, and July 17, 2020 (original) (raw)

To start, it would be interesting to refer to the etymology of the word ‘balcony’. ‘Balcone’ derived from ‘balco’, which in old Italian means ‘scaffold’, and ‘one’, which is an augmentative suffix. It means big scaffold. Balconies differ from their cousins, terraces (because they are cantilevered), and viewing platforms (because they are attached to dwellings). The “Balcony” was one of the elements that was investigated in the Venice Biennale of 2014 curated by Rem Koolhaas, which was devoted to the topic “Elements of Architecture”. The section of the exhibition that was devoted to the ‘Balcony’ curated by Tom Avermaete was structured around three narrative lines: the first narrative line concerned the political role of the balcony, referring to both its micro-political and macro-political dimension, the second narrative line concerned its focal role, while the third narrative line concerned its liminal role. The political role of the balcony became evident in the case of the “renunciation” speech by Eva Perón in Buenos Aires and the first address of the liberated Mandela at the Cape Town City Hall in 1990 among other cases. The second narrative line, which concerned the focal role of the balcony, included a full-size model of a Haussmannian balcony, which should be understood in conjunction with the bourgeois public sphere in 19th century Paris. The Haussmannian balcony was confronted with the modernist transparency of the Bauhaus at Dessau and an Algerian balcony by Fernand Pouillon in which vernacular and modern definitions of the public sphere coincide. The third narrative line of the section of the exhibition devoted to the balcony concerned the liminal role of the balcony and included an ensemble of photographs of collective housing projects. Its objective was to render explicit the capacity of the balcony to articulate the interior and the exterior, the private and the public, the individual and the collective. It paid special attention to its informality and to its capacity to function as an in-between articulating the private and public realms. The exhibition intended to shed light not only on the spatial characteristics of the balcony, but most importantly on its different cultural appropriations and its experiential complexity. The exhibition also included a prototype of a mashrabiya, which is an architectural element which is characteristic of Arabic residences. It is a type of projecting oriel window enclosed with carved wood latticework located on the second story of a building or higher, often lined with stained glass. The life in the balcony is an important aspect of the quotidian life in the Mediterranean cities. As Bernardo Zacka remarks that “[t]he genius of the balcony is to assemble people who live within proximity, but who are otherwise strangers, around a common world of events, experiences and issues”. The very force of the experience of the balcony lies in its in-betweenness, that is to say in the fact that it combines privacy and publicity, as well as interiority and exteriority. The degree of its publicity and exteriority varies from culture to culture. I could refer, for instance, to the architectural element called mashrabiya. Beginning in the Middle Ages, enclosed mashrabiya balconies with ornate latticework were built across much of the Arab world to allow residents to enjoy the fresh breeze while adhering to Islamic laws of privacy.