Project by: Virginia Italia (@virginia.italia)
The Balcony is is an ongoing visual essay investigating the balcony as an overlooked architectural archetype embedded within everyday life. Positioned between interior and exterior, public and private, the balcony becomes a spatial threshold through which political, social, and domestic life unfolds. Through collected imagery spanning photography, film, archival material, and art, the book examines how seemingly ordinary architectural elements accumulate meaning across different histories and contexts.
Structured through visual juxtapositions, the book draws on excerpts from Georges Perec to form associations between moments of spectacle, isolation, performance, and observation, collectively revealing how architecture participates in the construction of everyday life. Across each spread, the layout uses sequencing, repetition, and shifts in scale to frame relationships between images drawn from entirely different contexts. Altogether creating an evolving archive of the multiple lives of a balcony.
