cumba

Istanbul tried to limit this window. People kept building it anyway.

It's called a cumba: a room that leans out over the street. Downstairs, the house stops at the property line.

Upstairs, the floor beams slide out past the wall, and diagonal braces called eli böğründe, literally "hands on hips", hold them up.

More room, more light, a view down the whole street, without taking an inch of the road below.

Some call it a tax dodge. Yet after great fires, 19th-century building codes capped it, and even taxed it. The cumba survived.

Its cousins: the oriel in Europe, the mashrabiya in Cairo, the jharokha in India.

Cumba. A room that borrows space from the street.