Exhibited as part of “No Doubt About It,” curated by Vladimir Belogolovsky, at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale — Magazzino Gallery, Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice, May 8 – November 23, 2025.
The balcony has always been more than an architectural extra. It’s a threshold — neither room nor street — where private life spills into public view. In Tbilisi, that threshold carries even more weight: balconies double as dining rooms, summer bedrooms, political stages, and informal galleries of laundry, woven so deeply into the city’s fabric that they’ve become a form of collective memory.
Metra Hills takes this tradition and makes it the architecture itself. Instead of balconies as an afterthought, the building is wrapped in a continuous, inhabitable envelope of deep balconies that replaces the conventional façade with a porous, living skin.
At the heart of the project is a shared balcony suspended on the fourth floor — a contemporary reinterpretation of the salakbo, Tbilisi’s traditional “gossip balcony.” Framed between two residential wings, it opens into a vertical plaza in the sky: a shared garden and gathering space that brings neighbors together in a way modern apartment living rarely allows.
The design grew out of a close study of five archetypal ways Tbilisi residents actually use their balconies — as a gossip balcony, a dining balcony (for the traditional supra), a sleeping balcony, a political stage, and a laundry balcony. Each of these rituals shaped how the building’s shared and private balconies were designed to flex and adapt.
The project is grounded in original research by architecture historian Tatia Gvineria, tracing the Georgian balcony from its roots in cave dwellings and the Tbilisi bani (flat rooftop terrace) through its typological development in 19th-century Tbilisi, its recurring role in Georgian cinema and literature, and its function today as a stage for political expression — from protest banners to flags to acts of collective mourning. Across every era, the balcony consistently reappears as the same thing: a private space that speaks publicly.
