O Balcão. Debruçar sobre a cidade

Abstract

This dissertation arises in the midst of the moment in which the world is living, a historic period of health crisis that challenges us to radically change our habits, the way we perceive both domestic and public spaces and all the physical and psychological relationships that surround them. Since the COVID-19 virus began to spread, public spaces around the world have been emptied, and we have been living in our homes twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This fact caused the experiences of public space to be extended from the street to the air - to windows, balconies, terraces - generating new relationships between places, space and people. The home, that sacred space so intimate and private, opens outwards, involuntarily projecting itself into these spaces "in between" the daily lives of individuals who in turn end up finding new resources with which to connect to the exterior. In Italy, for example, where the proliferation of the disease was devastating and forced the government to take extreme measures across the country, implementing strict quarantines and curfews that restricted simple freedoms, Italians had to use their creativity to interact with the outer space and their neighbors, using balconies and terraces to overlook the city - at the moment quite inhospitable -, with varied forms of manifestation calling into question the limit of the public and the private, of what is outside and what is inside. This new (and momentary) scenario, and especially those aspects that accompany it, made me reflect on the relationships between individuals and their need to connect with the city, and how architecture can and should contribute to the most varied scenarios that the world can submit us to. In view of that, it motivates me to dive into these issues, having as an object the balcony. The balcony becomes a space for observation, expression, distraction, creation - in short, a singular artifice which once again gains strength in the context of contemporary cities.