Journals / Meltem İzmir Akdeniz Akademisi Dergisi / 2020 / Sayı: 7
Balcony As An Intermediate Space: A Prosthetic Threshold In The Domestic-Urban Life Of Izmir
- Issue
- 2020 · Sayı: 7
- Pages
- 6–27
- DOI
- —
Abstract
In the history of housing, balconies always appear as an important threshold between indoor and outdoor as well as between private and public life. In the transformative story of housing, we observe that, as new spaces have been introduced into design solutions, some spaces have undergone transformations or evolved like an organism, and some of them have gradually become subject to shrinking, or even extinction. In the current case of Izmir, the balconies generally fall into the last category, as prosthetic thresholds. Therefore, in this study, we tried to reveal the transformation story that extends to near extinction of balconies, by making comparison, and display that there is a legible difference between the late modern and post-modern cases of multi-storey housing-blocks in Izmir. The difference gives clues about possible transformations in inhabitants’ life-styles, besides referring to the condition of balconies in contemporary design solutions.
Özet
In the history of housing, balconies always appear as an important threshold between indoor and outdoor as well as between private and public life. In the transformative story of housing, we observe that, as new spaces have been introduced into design solutions, some spaces have undergone transformations or evolved like an organism, and some of them have gradually become subject to shrinking, or even extinction. In the current case of Izmir, the balconies generally fall into the last category, as prosthetic thresholds. Therefore, in this study, we tried to reveal the transformation story that extends to near extinction of balconies, by making comparison, and display that there is a legible difference between the late modern and post-modern cases of multi-storey housing-blocks in Izmir. The difference gives clues about possible transformations in inhabitants’ life-styles, besides referring to the condition of balconies in contemporary design solutions.