Balcony rights and wrongs

By Will Jennings

Around the world, lockdown life has focused attention on gardens, public parks and balconies, and perhaps could lead to new rights and respects for this unique space

From China to Italy, Brazil to Britain, we have seen how balconies have offered a platform for display, solidarity, communication and protest across a planet sharing such anxious circumstances. These spaces have supported community singalongs; political protest against authoritarianism; an introduction to neighbours above, below and to the side; socially-distanced group exercises and baskets on ropes lowered to the street to be filled with groceries, a lifeline for the isolated. They have become a symbol of a developing global and local togetherness. But after lockdown recedes, and noise and pollution return, will these balconies be vacated once more, or will they remain occupied as a critical component to urban life, community, and nature?

The balcony began life, as so much in our built environment, as a military structure. The bretèche dangled outside of fortifications, a device for defenders to launch rocks, arrows and oil onto attackers.

As cities evolve, architectural forms get repurposed: so too the bretèche migrated from defensive into civic space, built into city halls as platform for pronouncements, presentation and performed politics. Over time, balconies also became focal points for festivals and games, a space where dignitaries spectated religious processions, jousting tournaments and fêtes. They offered a space where invited guests could not only see the activities but be seen by the population as a guest of royal or political elite. 1 Throughout history, civic balconies have retained this importance as spaces to display power, from Papal blessings to Mussolini’s posturing and Ceausescu’s final speech, and as a backdrop for media-age moments from that Royal Wedding to the celebratory raising of sports trophies and Michael Jackson’s baby-dangling.

What the ruling classes do in civic space, upper middle classes replicate in the domestic, and the development of porticos and loggias to grand homes gave a space of entertainment overlooking personal courtyards and gardens. As cities became more compact, this vernacular filtered into smaller homes and apartments, with porticos directly addressing the street. After windows were enlarged to offer access, the balcony emerged.

In the late 16th century, when Shakespeare wrote his famous scene, Juliet simply appeared “above, at a window”. There wasn’t a word in English for balcony, but within a few decades, when audiences were reading, watching and critiquing Shakespeare’s play, balconies were becoming quite the rage. First appearing on stately piles, they were then drawn into cities, not least with Inigo Jones’ 1630s Europeaninfluenced designs for Covent Garden. By the time of Baron Haussmann’s 19th century Paris redesign, balconies were a critical element of the urban set piece, wrought ironwork offering horizontal bandings along boulevards.

Just as the civic balcony offered a vantage of events below, so too the domestic balcony watched over dramas of modern everyday life, the theatre of the street and all its actors. Édouard Manet rendered this in The Balcony, his 1868-9 oil painting in which three figures fill the foreground, a servant concealed in the shadows behind, encapsulating the very modern moment where private and public lives found new spaces of intersection, and new city forms were designed around the gaze. The three main figures look in different directions, seemingly more interested in the world out there than the one shared within, while our vantage of them is from the same level, perhaps from a balcony across the street.

They possess a sense of vulnerability in this new democratic duality of private and public, theorist Michel Foucault described the painting as “suspended between the darkness and the light, between the interior and the exterior… at the limit of light and darkness… of life and death.”

Mutual gaze is at the core of the balcony’s identity. This recently hit the news when residents of luxury housing development Neo Bankside filed a complaint that Tate Modern visitors could stare straight into their £1m-£15m apartments. The rooms in which tourists found such spectacle were in fact not rooms at all, but balconies wrapped in single-skin glazing and rebranded as a “winter garden”. While owners may treat it as an internal space with carefully curated designer furniture, the gawping tourists are in fact gazing upon a balcony. Display and mutual gaze is key to the balcony’s meaning, and the case was thrown out of court with the judge proposing net curtains.

The balcony exists at this confluence of public and private, and with that the argument around how the individual engages with the wider world. In Ceausescu’s Romania, the state clamped down on “improper” use of balconies. Officials randomly inspected them, followed by written warnings and educational workshops if there was evidence of growing vegetables, storage, or drying clothes, considered provincial dirty habits. To the state, balconies were a shorthand to collective order, if the appearance of blocks was tidy, then so too the façade of the system seemed intact, and with it individuality and mess of the civitas removed from view.

In 21st century Britain, neoliberal freeholds and leaseholds can seem remarkably similar. A friend’s lease states that, “a patio table and garden furniture not more than four patio chairs and eight well maintained pot plants are permitted on balconies. No other items are permitted at any time and the use of balconies as a storage facility is strictly prohibited as is the drying of washing or the use of bamboo ‘screens’.” There are post-Grenfell and litigious reasons for this, but within urban environments which arguably value capital return and rental profit over people’s lived experience, such strict management of appearances appear in support of maintaining a presentable if anonymous image for the distanced gaze of an investor.

As I look up at balconies on my daily mandated walk, I don’t think of Manet’s rendering and his smart, somewhat awkward characters. All the people I could see were entirely comfortable, and in the Spring sun were wearing far less. Belgian surrealist René Magritte re-rendered the scene in Perspective II: Manet’s Balcony, but transmogrified all four figures into coffins, and in a world dominated by tragedy, fear, virus and loss, it is this artwork which comes to mind. At a time of coronavirus, when balconies offer a way for individuals to enter the public realm, showing the world they are still alive while remaining isolated, Magritte’s metamorphosis of bodies to coffins, life to death, takes on a prescience. In this world of loss, each figure witnessed on a balcony is not only a statement of life, but an acknowledgment of death.

The essence of the threshold between inside/outside, private/ public, enclosed/open, claustrophobia/ agoraphobia, and voyeur/viewed that makes balconies such delicate yet valuable elements of the cultural and social realm, can also nourish the natural. As we address climate breakdown, planted balconies could not just be a luxury, but critical to our urban response, invaluable in buffering noise, filtering air, retaining heat and offering shade. Even if only some of a city’s balconies were transformed, then heat island effects could be fought against and the struggle against climate breakdown can be both supported and made visual.

The problem is that balconies are currently conceived as decorative add-ons, not integral elements of a complicated urban programme. A 1957 report into Londoners’ uses of balconies found that when a window box was built into the balcony, the percentage of residents who grew plants or vegetables more than doubled to 80%. 5 With the ever-critical need to consider architecture and landscape as one, built and natural environment in tandem, a deeper consideration of the balcony could be key.

The only life to have survived from Manet to Magritte is a potted hydrangea in the corner of the balcony, and perhaps this flourishing flower offers a possible future for balconies in our cities. That beyond operating as a space for us, and all our sociopolitical demands, they are also perfect spaces to support the immediate need to pack our cities with nature, offering perfect habitat for a range of flora, whether succulent, fern, herb, tree, fruit or flower.

There is far more ecological potential for the balcony than a sad bamboo rush screen weaved between railings. Just as Manet’s hydrangea survived through to Magritte, so too other nature can thrive in this liminal, sheltered, airy space. Each balcony could become a tiny allotment growing tomatoes, basil, sage, providing core ingredients for a post-COVID pasta sauce. Flowers and pot plants can decorate, offer natural framing from the inside out, and display personal identity to the world looking back.

In 1935, ethical socialist, politician and proponent of urban gardening Ada Salter, wrote to The Times stating: “Owing to the economic crisis through which this country is passing, depression is rife and it is difficult to estimate true values. … The cultivation of the tiny front gardens and the homely forecourt must be achieved if the common man and woman passing to and fro may “inhale the sweet scents of the flowers coming and going like the warbling of music.”’ 6 In not dissimilar times, with “tiny front gardens” now arrayed across great blocks, Salter’s green socialism can help us reimagine balconies as a great patchwork of individual frames, disassociated gardens, and moments of tranquillity, decorating the solid city and celebrating life within.

The architect Freidrich Hundertwasser wrote of “Window Rights”, suggesting that grids of uniformity are “unbearable”, and that as individuals are never identical themselves “a person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and… be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm’s reach… visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door.”

If we can draw anything from this awful COVID situation, a newfound solidarity, communal action, natural opportunity and playful personalisation could emerge. Perhaps now we need to develop “Balcony Rights” to continue to evolve their unique social, natural and political qualities evident through lockdown, and to address how our natural and human landscape is designed with this key interstitial battleground in our collective climate and social struggles.

Will Jennings is a London based writer and visual artist, interested in cities and human influenced environments, in particular how they intersect with politics, culture, history, and society. He is a 2020 Fellow of the Future Architecture Platform.