BRICK BY BRICK

BALCONIES: A MORAL GEOMETRY

AURELIA EXEDRA

November 21, 2025

Now that fall has returned to those of us in the northern hemisphere, life is retreating indoors again. Windows close, light turns inward, and the sound of the street becomes something overheard rather than shared. Cities fold back into themselves. Yet beyond the windowpanes, balconies remain—suspended thresholds between exposure and withdrawal, traces of a season when life was still visible. They stand like empty gestures, reminders of how architecture records our habits of openness and retreat. To step onto a balcony in autumn is to feel the growing distance between the self and the world, between participation and privacy—a faint architectural echo of our willingness, once, to be seen.

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There are streets that reveal everything about a city, and there are balconies that reveal everything about how it wishes to be seen. The balcony is a confession, a hesitation, a self-portrait of the society that builds it. Some are shy, recessed behind heavy railings, as if to apologize for existing. Others push outward into the street like declarations. To walk beneath them is to walk through a museum of intentions: the modest, the proud, the frightened, the performative.

Domestic weather: sunlight, laundry, and the small negotiations of everyday life hung out for the neighborhood to see.

From the street, a balcony looks like an ornament, but from within, it feels like a conscience. It is where the domestic world meets the civic one—the edge of private life that refuses to stay entirely indoors. Every culture negotiates this edge differently. In Palermo or Panama, balconies bloom with plants and laundry, confessions made in fabric and chlorophyll. In Stockholm or Zurich, they remain austere, glazed, almost embarrassed. The moral code is visible in the architecture: In some places, the self is meant to reach outward, and in others, to remain invisible.

A balcony, Swedish edition: rational, restrained, and fully prepared to withstand emotional weather.

I have lived in many cities where the balcony served as the last form of conversation between people who no longer spoke. In Havana, they were full of gestures—greetings, gossip, flirtations, arguments shouted across the air. The buildings were crumbling, but the balconies still worked as conduits of speech, of life that refused to be silent. In Dubai, the balconies were sealed with tinted glass to protect against dust and judgment; no one ever stepped onto them. The building itself performed exposure while the human disappeared. Between those two extremes lies the story of the modern world—the struggle between visibility and withdrawal.

Where balconies age like revolutionaries—beautiful, bruised, and permanently on the verge of telling a better story.

The first time I realized that balconies carry a moral function was in Naples. I stayed in an apartment on Via dei Tribunali, opposite an elderly woman who appeared every morning at precisely nine. She watered her plants, smoked one cigarette, and leaned on the railing just long enough to see the first delivery van squeeze through the alley. She waved to no one, spoke to no one, but her presence was part of the street’s equilibrium. When she wasn’t there, something in the atmosphere faltered. A balcony is not just an architectural feature; it is an organ of social time.

Where balconies double as living rooms, confessionals, and neighborhood newsrooms—often all before lunch.

There’s a sociology to the balcony that no planner ever admits. It measures the distance a society allows between interior life and exposure. The poorer the neighborhood, the more the balconies overflow. You can read class through their density: laundry lines, satellite dishes, plastic chairs, birdcages, radios playing to no one in particular. These are not decorative elements but declarations: proof that life persists even when walls are thin and privacy a luxury. In wealthier districts, the balconies are barer, guarded by glass, curated into silence. Visibility there feels dangerous, as though presence itself must be concealed.

Everywhere, the balcony reveals how people understand dignity. In Algiers, after independence, balconies once reserved for French families were reclaimed by Algerian ones who filled them with color and noise. In Istanbul, families dine together on narrow ledges, claiming air as part of domestic space. In Tokyo, the balconies are slender but meticulous, small platforms of calm with one potted tree, one chair, nothing superfluous. In each case, the same gesture—stepping outside—becomes a reflection of ethics: how to exist among others without surrendering the self.

Balconies as minor planets in the orbit of daily life—each with its own weather system of laundry and antennas.

The balcony’s sociology is also its moral paradox. It is both an act of openness and a defense mechanism. It allows participation without (too much) risk, belonging without (too much) exposure. The person on a balcony sees but is not seen fully, hears but cannot be touched. In older cities, to appear on the balcony was to declare oneself part of the street’s community, and to hide behind curtains was to renounce it. Today, the moral code has reversed. Privacy has become virtue; exposure, suspect. The balcony once offered discretion; now it threatens it.

I often think of how people use their balconies during moments of crisis. In Buenos Aires during the 2001 economic collapse, citizens banged pots from their balconies in a percussive form of protest. In Madrid, Milan, and many other cities throughout Europe, during lockdown, they applauded the unseen nurses below. The balcony allows for a type of speech that is public but not collective, a fragile chorus of individuals who find solidarity in distance. The balcony is the architecture of moral noise: protest without march, participation without mass.

The balcony as mannerism: poised, architectural, and forever waiting for someone suitably operatic to appear.

And yet, it can just as easily be a stage for domination. The twentieth century learned this too well. Balconies were built for speeches, for the theater of authority. They have the capacity to turn elevation into moral justification. The leader stands above, the crowd below, hierarchy enacted through architecture. The square becomes an audience, the voice amplified by stone. Even now, when balconies are used for political gestures—a wave from a palace, a declaration from a presidential terrace—they carry the residue of that imbalance. The balcony is an instrument of the gaze.

Modern urbanism has grown increasingly suspicious of that gaze. The glass facade, the sealed tower, the minimalist cube: all try to abolish the messy dialogue between inside and out. Balconies interrupt control. They invite improvisation, clutter, human unpredictability. That is why they are often the first casualty of modernization. Developers call them inefficient; planners deem them unsafe. But what they truly threaten is aesthetic order—the dream of cities without irregularities, without gestures, without conversation. A balcony resists that. It insists on human scale, on the moral right to appear imperfectly.

In Singapore, the new high-rises disguise their balconies behind uniform panels, as if ashamed of the domestic. In Mumbai, old balconies are being devoured by extensions, air conditioners, and metal grates, transformed into storage or security cages. In Lagos, balconies are acts of defiance, protruding from self-built houses that ignore zoning altogether. In Paris, the French balcony has become a fetish, divorced from the social life it once hosted. Each of these transformations reveals a different anxiety: control, fear, nostalgia, aspiration. Architecture absorbs the nervous system of society.

The vertical city: where every balcony is a life raft floating in the monsoon of metropolitan chaos.

Balconies are also barometers of gender. In many places, they have been the only outdoor spaces where women could appear without scandal. The colonial havelis of northern India had jharokhas—latticed balconies that allowed women to see without being seen. In Andalusian houses, ironwork served the same purpose, a veil in metal. The balcony, then, was a paradoxical liberation: visibility through concealment. Even today, in many cities, the balcony remains a cautious frontier for female autonomy—a place to breathe, to watch, to exist beyond surveillance yet within safety.

The balcony as a piece of theater: an architectural mask that reveals by concealing.

Children, too, understand balconies instinctively. They treat them as boundaries to test, edges of discovery. The first sense of the world’s depth often comes from looking down from one—the thrill of height, of smallness. For the elderly, the balcony is an instrument of endurance, a continuation of life when mobility fades. I once saw a man in Thessaloniki who spent entire days on his balcony, moving between chair and railing like a metronome. His wife had died, his friends were gone too, but his routine never faltered. The street below knew him. He was still part of it, if only as a silhouette.

That, perhaps, is the balcony’s quiet moral triumph: It allows people to remain part of the world without having to submit to it. It offers proximity without surrender. In an age where exposure has become absolute—where lives are broadcast, interiors photographed, every gesture archived—the balcony teaches exposure with restraint, contact with measure. Standing there, you are visible but not consumed, social but not performed. It may be the last space where self and world can still meet on negotiated terms.

When I think of the cities that have most shaped me, I often remember them through their balconies. Nice, where sea light turns every railing into a mirror; Rio, where balconies seem to float on humidity; Berlin, where they look functional until you notice the potted basil and mismatched chairs; Hong Kong, where each balcony is an act of defiance against vertical anonymity. The materials change—iron, concrete, bamboo, glass—but the impulse to pause at the edge of one’s life and look outward remains constant.

A hundred balconies, each performing the same play with a different script: survival, improvisation, and the art of drying laundry in impossible wind.

There is, too, an ethics of maintenance. To tend to a balcony is to care for visibility itself. The plants must be watered, the rust brushed away, the small ecosystem of public-private life preserved. Neglected balconies always feel like moral warnings—facades that no longer speak. In Lisbon, whole blocks of buildings tilt under the weight of disuse, their balconies hanging like unkept promises. The loss is not aesthetic but civic. A city that forgets how to inhabit its balconies forgets how to inhabit itself.

And what of those who have no balconies at all? The global majority lives in conditions where exposure is not a choice but a sentence. Informal housing rarely offers thresholds; life spills directly into the street. The absence of a balcony there is not symbolic but literal: no buffer between fatigue and visibility, no controlled distance. In that sense, the balcony is a privilege—a small luxury of perspective. It allows contemplation, and contemplation requires space. The question is not who has a view, but who has the right to one.

Sometimes I wonder if balconies exist to remind us that architecture has a moral responsibility. Buildings are not just shelters; they are social contracts. A city that erases its balconies may gain efficiency but loses the visible signs of humanity—the plants, the drying clothes, the pauses. Those small acts of self-display are what make a city recognizable to itself. Without them, we live in environments that no longer reflect us, only manage us.

It’s not nostalgia to say this; it’s anthropology. Every society leaves behind traces of how it wanted to be seen. Future archaeologists will read our sealed towers and uniform facades as evidence of a civilization obsessed with privacy and control, fearful of the unplanned. They will wonder why we stopped stepping outside.

I still do it each evening, wherever I am. I step out for a few minutes, lean on the railing, and look down. Sometimes the street is busy, sometimes not. Someone smokes, someone waters plants, someone else stands exactly like me, not doing anything in particular. I find it comforting—the quiet fraternity of those who linger between participation and retreat. The air always feels different out there. Thinner, more honest.

A balcony is not a place; it’s a practice. It teaches a form of attention that urban life otherwise discourages. To stand there is to accept the terms of visibility—to be seen, but not entirely, to see, but not possess. It is a lesson in proportion, in the small art of coexisting without intrusion. Cities, like people, need such thresholds.

A skyscraper with no balconies because intimacy, apparently, is a security risk.

And when I finally go back inside, I feel that faint sense of continuity, as if I had momentarily touched the larger rhythm that connects one life to another, one city to the next. The balcony remains behind me, empty now, but still holding its shape in the air: a thin, suspended promise that the world is still out there, waiting to be looked at—and, if we’re lucky, looked back from.

Aurelia Exedra (born 1986 in Thessaloniki) studied architecture in Rome and moral philosophy in Athens. She writes about the emotional and ethical residues of architecture—the balconies, stairwells, and public squares where people half-appear—and calls it research. She now lives in Montpellier, mostly on balconies.

Cover image: Modernism promised collective living; the balconies reveal four hundred individual interpretations of what that means.