Balconies

Balconies, I’ve come to believe, are mostly unnecessary excrescences - fragile add-ons to buildings. Bits of ugly frippery, which are in no way essential to the rest of the structure, they are basically pointless accretions.

Now this, of course, isn’t meant to include the wooden balconies at the Globe; they are an integral part of that building, and fulfil a useful function: that of letting the audience safely see the stage. Nor do I necessarily mean the occasional rococo continental balcony sitting comfortably on a plump white building. They just seem to fit.  Especially overseas.

Also, a flat roof covering part of a house such as a kitchen extension, with a balustrade, is not a balcony; it’s just someone using their roof more efficiently.

To help with further explanations, here is a guide from 'artisiticrail'.

Balconies are classified in to 3 styles Faux, False & True. Faux styles are used to decorate a window and are for ornamentation. A False Balcony has a deck projection of approximately 4" to 6" and are mainly designed and installed to block off an open doorway. True Balconies are designed and installed to be walked on and comprised of (sic) a deck and the railing”

So the main targets of my mild aesthetic distaste are those “True” balconies (according to the above analysis) stuck on to modernist, high-rise buildings. Oh, I admit that there is a possible argument in their favour – that people cooped up in horrible high-rise blocks need a sense of the ‘outside,’ and that balconies can in part provide this. And that this is especially true of residential high-rises.

I can also admit that I have a deep and abiding dislike (alright then, fear) of heights and sheer drops that does nothing to endear balconies to me (and stories like this are distinctly unhelpful).

Also, I fear I am coming across all Howard Roark from The Fountainhead (and also like a famously-wooden Gary Cooper in the famously-poor film of the same). Dynamiting the balconies that had been added to his otherwise clinically modern architecture.

Well sorry, but unlike him I see these balconies as part of, and not opposed to, the modernist aesthetic. I really don’t like modernist architecture much either.

And in any case, if a building requires balconies to provide these outside areas, perhaps it is too big already.  And poorly designed, to boot.

And finally, balconies connect in my mind with the waves - I mean the waving - of the powerful. Kings and Popes, leaders to the led.  I bet they waved from a balcony at some point during the recent Royal Wedding farrago (we didn't watch). So balconies are also symbols of dull, earthly overlordship.

And yet...

And yet I can remember when we lived in a low-rise block, and had a balcony.

I can remember sitting out on that balcony at night, and looking at the sky.

I was 14 or 15, and not terrifically happy at school. And the balcony on our flat became for a while (I have to admit through gritted teeth) something of a personal private space.

It was a council flat – but new, and although small it was OK for us. And the balcony was cramped, but it would take me, a chair and my two and a bit inch refractor.

We were on the first floor, and the balcony looked South towards the Seven Sisters Road, over a featureless, flat, muddy green playing field – and to the right, in the small industrial estate, was the bakery that Mum hated (the Jewish Grodzinski’s, which she insisted on calling 'Grodstinksy’s' because of the perpetual smell of baking bread).  At the time there were a lot of small businesses around that area - once my brother fell through the roof of one  of these while he was out larking about with a gang (resulting in just a busted arm and being grounded, thankfully).

But it was South facing. Which meant in the Winter I could see the Orion nebula (M42), Saturn's rings and Jupiter with his moons. The telescope was just big enough to resolve the rings and hint at one of the divisions, while Jupiter’s Galilean satellites, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, appeared as tiny pinpoint flecks of light. (And looking them up, I’ve just spotted that last year was the 400th anniversary of their discovery. Amazing!).  I never did repeat what Galileo did, and estimate the periods of the moons, nor did I polish my own mirror and build my own relfector.  But Mars, when it was visible, still appeared as the tiniest of red discs in the telescope I did have, and I gazed at that.  And I moon-gazed too, concentrating (like I was told you should) on the terminator to get the most starling view.

I had books on space and spaceflight by Patrick Moore, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, and a cheap star atlas, but mostly I just enjoyed looking at the sky.

In my head this is all connected to the Astronomical Society of Haringey, the moon landings, reading SF (this was all pre-Star Wars, pre-Hitchhiker and pre-Neuromancer, of course) and learning (some) science.  But   it is connected not so much by content, as by a common feeling of astonished awe and pleasure in the numinous (as I wrote earlier this year). And I could look out at all that stuff from our balcony.

I suspect I should reflect upon language, too. I wouln't have said 'numinous'.  Because in all important aspects the numinous is the same as sensawunda.  And the Keats poem is also about sensawunda, (and not only because of the "watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken" - although he does help to illustrate it)  - just as Patrick Moore’s 700th episode is, because he too tapped into the numinous in his own gruff, crotchety way.

So I suppose that there are balconies, and balconies…