Balcony — the in-between space

 The project focuses on examining the proposals generated by balcony modifications implemented on four residential buildings connected at ground level through a passageway, and the ways in which these interventions respond to recurring issues within the housing question. When the notion of the balcony is approached through Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive method of reading, it emerges as a device that destabilizes binary oppositions such as public/private, interior/exterior, boundary/center, and controlled/contingent. In doing so, it produces indeterminate zones that blur these distinctions and function as the building’s very pharmakon. Such ambiguity constitutes a latent richness that necessitates an architecture of contingency and serves as a source of spatial adaptability.

I developed the design strategy throught deconstructive reading of rem koolhaas's definition of balconies: 

"A laboratory where, on the frontier between inside and outside, public and private, sometimes explosive experiments are tested."

The reading methodology is represented above (page from sketchbook)

                                (top perspective view, floorings removed) 

These indeterminate zones encourage inhabitants to transform building façades into anthropological exhibitions, as they become laboratories in which users primitively and directly enact their needs and expectations from architecture. Faced with such a display, the architect is compelled not to design life itself, but rather to design in accordance with life. Balconies operate as spaces where the public infiltrates the private and where the distinction between inside and outside is negotiated through varying conditions of comfort and discomfort. In terms of the pharmakon, the balcony functions simultaneously as remedy and poison: while fresh air, sunlight, sociability, and natural illumination constitute its curative aspects, exposure, lack of privacy, noise, and adverse climatic conditions represent its toxic dimensions  

as in order: 

projection from şişli mosque

projection from opposite pavement

the back opening of the passage

The design strategy is informed by the ways in which residents appropriated and informally reconfigured their balconies in everyday life. Accordingly, the proposal adopts a similarly adaptive logic, integrating structural experimentation while responding to the façade requirements of contiguous urban blocks. The balconies are equipped with passive climate-control and rainwater-harvesting systems and are conceived as modular and reconfigurable frameworks capable of facilitating social interaction while simultaneously ensuring privacy    

(site plan)

section a-a

In articulating a position within the housing debate, contextual relationships are superimposed onto the balcony system, generating layered spatial scenarios that reveal the diverse potentials of the balcony typology. What appears externally as a threatening accumulation of metal structures is transformed into hospitable environments: green refuges capable of accommodating urban non-human others, and intimate spaces enriched by warm materialities that fulfill conditions of comfort and dwelling.   

                     ground floor plan                   regular floor plan