Fevered respite: I have been thinking a lot about porches lately. Too much perhaps, so that I am immersed in my own inquiry. So that I am less convinced of a necessary distance. I imagine conversations here on the porch where I often work and where I have invited dialogues with strangers, ghosts, colleagues, and friends. Among this crowd of guests, I listen to artists and scientists, writers and photographers, presidents and naturalists. Here on a porch in Florida, their voices mix with the chirp of cicadas, wind in the cedars, and the river’s murmur as it runs back and forth with tides and rain. Wrapped in the same anxious calm and fevered respite where Goethe slept fitfully but productively on his Gartenhaus terrace and where Calvin Stowe hallucinated and recounted those heady dreams to Harriet Beecher (both dressed in wool, crinoline, and humidity), this crowded porch respects neither time nor location but does hew toward those who themselves have lingered—whether as porch-sitters or porch-thinkers (or both)—on porches, balconies, terraces, and other plein air architectures: James Agee, Athena, Wendell Berry, John Burroughs, John Cage, Rachel Carson, bell hooks, Paul Cézanne, Zora Neale Hurston, Luce Irigaray, Louis Kahn, Sigurd Lewerentz, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Monet, John Muir, John Prine, Teddy Roosevelt, John Ruskin, Socrates, Paul Strand.
Working definition: Two others helped me define the porch, early in the research, now more than a decade ago. In their work with Axel Bruchhaüser, architects Alison and Peter Smithson defined porch as method.[1] For them, this procedure was not merely theoretical; it was an active negotiation of site and context, of the “charged void” between Axel’s hexenhaus and the wooded slopes along the Weser River. In one my favorite photographs of architects at work, here is Alison Smithson on her hands and knees measuring, laying out edges, and talking with Axel. They crouch and bend and stretch on sheets of plywood, no more than fifty square meters, in a small, introspective space with all the reach and public import of urban projects like Golden Lane. They are mocking up, in real time, a private porch space for a man and his cat. A porch is an indeterminate space that elides finite definitions and negotiates fields of resistance as it also tunes person and place.
An invitation: On this teeming porch, two stood out more recently. Jay Fellows taught me that a porch, like the “framed threshold,” moves away from dialectics toward the dialogic. Put another way, porches hold oppositions without dialectical mediation.[2] Just as porches make room for conversation on the cusp of nature and along the frontiers of built form, the dialogues they house always have two sides. Think of the double-sidedness of a porch screen, where its veiling reflection makes for a play between hiding and revealing based on light. Porches are much more complicated than a simple blend of open and closed or of public and private. And John Dewey helped me understand how a porch embraces such paradox. An advocate of the stable and the precarious, Dewey couldn’t’ resist talking about resistance and its active role in experience. Resistance binds together attitude and skilled method in his discussion of inquiry, here in this oft-quoted aphorism: “The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.” Aesthetic experience needs resistance, just like a porch needs sun, rain, wind, strangers, neighbors, and fiberglass mesh. It is a place that hosts what Dewey called “undergoing,” with its idea of receiving, and doing, which offers a delicate balance—a delicate tuning, the Smithsons would say.[3] In this sense, a porch is an invitation to active, even radical, reflection.
Dialogue of pairings: Another favorite photograph depicts the shirtless philosopher serenely typing at a tiny folding table. His sandaled feet set firmly on the open porch’s floorboards, Dewey leans over the Underwood. Sun warms his back, and a small boat glides on Lake Sawler in the distance. The chair’s birch logs are thick as arms. A book rests on the table’s corner, precariously, as if it might fall onto the dog at his feet. Here is Dewey, vulnerable and intent, comfortable and aged, outside in deepening thought, writing. I have no such image of Fellows but what if the two had met on a porch? Maybe in Miami or Key West, where Dewey wintered? What stories would be told?
Lexicon / diary: I am convinced such dialogues can inhabit a lexicon, which has its roots in public speaking and diction. As a nascent vocabulary of the porch, these pairings hinge on stories that oscillate between the didactic and the diaristic. If the former guides practice within a discipline, then the latter registers private ruminations sometimes made public. Similarly, a porch frames as it also folds space and time, it holds secrets and opens out onto streets, it documents and daydreams. These pairings offer preliminary notes for contemporary practices because porches are meant to be lived, experimented with, repaired and constantly redefined.[4] So often we hear how wonderful porches are for their combination of inside and outside, which suggests an all too easy resolution of architecture and nature and of the domestic interior with what is “out there,” in an activity of building that inherently, and unavoidably, disrupts its context. Amid climate crises, post-pandemic life, and social change, no such resolution exists, and the difficult work of undergoing and doing must continue and persist.
Already / not yet: Porches anticipate the future as they also look back. In cases of the former, a porch foreshadows imminent change because of its unconditioned link to climate.[5] Which is to say that a porch is barometric.[6] It is an early indication—an advance warning—of climate’s changes, both short- and long-term.
Conditioned / unconditioned: The unconditioned porch moves, while its house—conditioned by heating and cooling, glazing and walls—stays put.
Here / there: The porch where I have been writing for this past decade rides this change like an open-air vessel. Each year I notice the increased number of mangroves growing up around the lagoon outside the porch. Each king tide rises that much closer to the porch’s tilted floor. Each season, another cedar, another palm, and another live oak dies from saltwater intrusion. Their silver trunks shimmer in the heat. Climatically speaking, in terms of rising temperatures, the porch where I write has moved southward nearly one hundred miles to Tampa, but the snook that seek warmer water already know that. I am still here, but climatically I am there. A witness.
Restorative / reflective: Some look back with nostalgia and the already becomes a no more to be lamented. Porches cut across the “restorative” and the “reflective” that Svetlana Boym found in nostalgia. The former “stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” and the latter “thrives in algia, the longing itself” and “explores ways of inhabiting many places at once.”[7] Porches are anachronistic and exceedingly contemporary.
Absence / presence: Last year, during my residency at a nearby arts center, I set out to build a porch without a house—a porch that would rely on its itself for support but would recall its connections to house and home. Out for a walk in the neighborhood next to the center, I encountered a vacant lot where a house had recently been demolished. Patches of bright green grass remained, amid upturned sand and dirt, around a concrete slab swept clean of walls, plumbing, and tiles. Only the porch remained. Its side walls canted outward, its thin roof sagged, and its catenary form was reminiscent of Paul Rudolph’s Cocoon House, which still stands across the peninsula on the other coast. In the house’s absence, afternoon sun fills the porch. The roof’s shadow drapes down across the screen, evaporates the mesh, and further dematerializes the porch. Its crystalline lens also brings the backyard closer, in sharper focus. Here is a porch to nature in the house’s absence.
Stable / precarious: A porch hovers between comfort and discomfort, security and vulnerability, stability and precariousness.[8] How a porch resists a storm is that it lets the storm inside. Rain moves in and out, and wind moves through. The slope of a porch’s floor sheds rainfall, whether through scuppers or between floorboards. Porches assume inundation. They also meet air on its own terms; and screens offer a degree of resistance, but most are only designed to withstand one-hundred-mile-per-hour wind speeds. Porches may rely on their houses for structural support, but they also depend on their own precarity, out there on the house’s edge, for survival in hurricanes and other extreme weather events.[9] In 1992, I moved to south Florida to repair a house damaged by Hurricane Andrew. I marveled at the durability of two porches cantilevered off the second floor of the house. They had lost only their screens and a few inches of their cantilever when the hurricane’s center tracked right over the house. No one knows for sure how fast the winds blew because all of the official, publicly-funded wind gauges failed before the storm reached its peak. But one privately-owned device a few miles north of the porch registered what is now accepted as the maximum speed, a 79.4 meters-per-second (177-mile-per-hour) gust that lasted one minute. Before his anemometer blew away and before scientific tests later downgraded the wind speed, the amateur meteorologist claimed a reading of 95 meters per second (212 mph).[10] I imagine him out there on his own porch, squinting through squalls, the roar of wind in his ears.
Unknown / known: A stranger at home, Odysseus sleeps in his own echoing portico. He sleeps where suitors and, later in early Christian churches, the unbaptized await, on a porch along the edges of hospitality, under the roof but outside the interior chambers of house, palace or church. Here, on this palace’s porch, Odysseus eavesdrops on the suitors who pursue his wife Penelope inside, and a goatherd teases the disguised hero, where animals destined for the feast are tethered. And later, Odysseus overhears Penelope crying in her bedroom as he lies awake and plots his return.
Compromise: On November 22, 1916, writer Jack London died on the sleeping porch of his Beauty Ranch cottage. Three years earlier, he composed “When the World Was Young,” the story of James Ward, a successful but afflicted businessman. Aware of his atavistic tendencies, Ward builds himself a porch for sleeping on the second story of his house. Not one but two layers of screen thwart his nightly escapes to the woods: “Here he at least breathed the blessed night air.”[11] Each night his cook locks him up in the porch, and lets him out in the morning.
In / out: John Muir famously suggested that to go out is really going in.[12] On a porch, interiority just might be housed out of doors. The naturalist Muir was not one to worry about discrete boundaries. He slept on Yosemite’s pine needle as readily as a bed. The shelter he cantilevered off the Yosemite sawmill where he worked was shot through with windows, skylights, and gaps between boards and battens. The hen ladder that sloped up to what he called his “hang-nest” hosted farm animals and humans.
Near / peras: A question that set this porch research in motion was what happens when camping returns home. I think that’s why historian Frederick Jackson Turner pitched a tent on the back porch of his Cambridge house. Teaching Harvard students about a nation’s receding frontiers, he sought new fringes closer to home.
Immanence / transcendence: Paul Strand steps out onto his porch to make pictures. He watches sunlight carve shadows in the floorboards, and the photographer tips a round table on its side to find light on painted wood. Later in the day, he steps off the porch, lays down in the yard’s sun-warmed grass, and watches clouds clip the oblique corner of his porch. Alfred Stieglitz called Strand’s porch photographs “direct expression[s] of today” and said that the photographer had “actually done something from within,” and some believe that abstraction was born here on this workaday porch in rural Connecticut.[13] Across the Atlantic, Sigurd Lewerentz was designing the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm.[14] The architect matched arboreal form with spiritual presence in the Resurrection Chapel’s porch, where the slightest skew—inches between chapel and porch—opens a sliver of blue sky, marking transitions between living and dying.[15]
Veiling / reflecting: Lit from inside at night, the porch opens as a private stage. During the day, sunlight shrouds a public interior. The screening material itself contributes to this veiling phenomenon. Most screen, whether metal or cheaper fiberglass, has a reflective finish while the porosity of its weave lets light through.
Material / immaterial: On the porch, there are also times of the day when the screens evaporate. They become translucent, and I remember air. They remind me how Luce Irigaray connects breathing and being; she says that Heidegger forgot air and that “what is forgotten is always recalled.”[16] It is harder to forget air in a place like Florida, where air feels like water and the slightest breeze cools the skin.
Breeze / breath: Reading Irigaray and living on the porch, I became fascinated with the breathing body, as well as the breathing porch. A few years ago, I decided to paint the porch ceiling robin’s egg blue, and I hung visqueen—painter’s plastic sheeting—from the inside edge of the porch. Half a millimeter thick, the plastic soon billowed in the air of what I had only perceived as a windless day. The bottom of the sheet lifted slowly as if reaching for the porch’s back wall. Its seven feet fell short of the porch’s ten-foot depth, but its performance charged the porch’s full breadth as it furled and floated on freshets of air. Here were the most subtle movements of air, barely perceptible on my skin and only intermittently visible in leaves and grasses outside. I later hung a heavier scrim from the porch ceiling to study how air molds fabric and how light and shadow play across the screened wall. The scrim’s top edge glowed with the ceiling’s blue sheen; detail photographs of this joint have the uncanny effect of a Rothko paintings. The openings of the porch screen—a standard sixteen-by-sixteen weave—provided just enough openness to the air, and the screen’s stretch afforded just enough tension at this thinnest of thresholds. A porch’s resistance suffices; it is just enough.
Porous / boundary: If light treads carefully on either side of mesh, sound travels easily through a porch screen. And so do some bugs. Despite its “insect screen” moniker, mesh requires specific densities of weave—and close tolerances of production—to resist the intrusion of insects. Based on research into the behavior—and transgressive abilities—of Aedes mosquitoes, a grid of sixteen by sixteen wires per inch became the industry standard around the middle of the twentieth century. Postwar production economized the weave to eighteen warp wires and fourteen weft wires; and research here at the University of Florida, in a region saturated by wetlands and mosquitoes, found that twenty-by-twenty screening marks the threshold of balancing openness and closure. Researchers warned that higher wire densities noticeably reduced visibility and air circulation.[17] Meanwhile, the tiny biting gnats—known as no-see’ums—crawled on through the one-millimeter openings.
Invisible / visible: Birds and digital scanners have a harder time fathoming the ambiguities of porch screens. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings tells this story: “One day I selfishly picked all the hibiscus blossoms and put them in a bowl on the veranda table. A hummingbird tried to dart through the screen to come at them. His needle-bill caught in the wire and I loosened it gently. He flew away and perched on the fence and shook himself and tried to adjust himself to invisible barriers.”[18] A while ago, I made a three-dimensional digital scan of Rawlings’ porch in Cross Creek. The scanner did not know what to make of the mesh screens, the reflections in the French doors along the porch’s back wall, the flicker of morning through the pine trees, the zigzag of chickens in the front yard, and the general indeterminacy of the porch’s space. Which is to say that a porch resists documentation because it is made from both the visible and the invisible. For Dewey, this is a question of what is known and unknown and the two sides of existence: “The visible is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen decides what happens in the seen; the tangible rests precariously upon the untouched and ungrasped.”[19]
Air / water: Philip Lovell advocated the healthful benefits of fresh air in his “Care of the Body” columns for the LA Times. He sought this same fresh air on the sleeping porches of the beach house Rudolph Schindler designed for him. But less than a year after its completion, Lovell asked the architect to enclose this elevated tray of space that opened out toward the Pacific. Much later, in a 1978 interview, Dione Neutra attributed the change to the porches filling with water. The newly glazed spaces still harbored sunlight, though at the expense of fresh air and fog’s delicate moisture.[20] Dione also experienced another of the architect’s porch projects when she and architect Richard Neutra lived cooperatively with the Schindlers. She recalled how everyone carried umbrellas when they climbed up to the sleeping baskets at the Kings Road House.[21]
Coming / going: When Frank Lloyd Wright stepped inside the Glass House, he asked Philip Johnson whether he should take his hat off or leave it on.
Athena / Poseidon: Johnson based the plan of the Glass House on the North Porch of the Erechtheum, where Zeus’s thunderbolt pierced the roof and Poseidon’s trident made three deep scratches in the marble floor during the contest for Athens. The temple’s western porch housed Athena’s olive tree.
Porch / practice: Tuning person and place also means that porches are spaces for radical practice. bell hooks identifies the porch, in contrast to the patriarchal household, as “a democratic meeting place, capable of containing folks from various walks of life, with diverse perspectives.” For her, this “free-floating space” is “a small everyday place of antiracist resistance” where she and her sisters and mother could “practice the etiquette of civility.”[22] Porches anchor practices amid social reckoning, environmental crisis, and the pandemic’s many displacements of body and community.[23]
Social / distance: Piano teachers gave lessons from their porches during the pandemic, jazz musicians regaled small socially distanced audiences from their Brooklyn porches, home-bound Instagrammers snapped #porchtraits on their front porches, and neighbors talked through screens from sidewalk to porch in scenes that might have seemed antiquated and sentimental if they weren’t so brilliantly and immediately resilient. Porches are readymade spaces for social distancing.
Surveilled / surveilling: Historically, porches have been spaces to watch people and watch out for neighbors. Now, all eyes are on porch pirates, and many porches house surveillance equipment like Ring cameras that watch over packages delivered from Amazon, the video doorbell’s parent company. Porch piracy’s alliteration sputters with indignation and fear as it alludes to lawlessness born on a porch’s indeterminate space floating on seas of anxiety and capitalism.
Monumental / personal: Presidents have long sought escape along the White House’s edges. William Taft paced the South Portico’s roof, Dwight Eisenhower grilled hot dogs behind the roof’s parapet, and Teddy Roosevelt viewed the “hardy life of the open” from a makeshift outpost atop the national symbol.[24] On May 22, 1918, Colonel C. S. Ridley drafted plans for a sleeping shelter that would soon be tethered atop the White House. Ridley had included a small stair in the design so that Woodrow Wilson, exhausted by war and illness, could step out the third-floor bedroom window into the screened room tucked behind the South Portico’s heavy balustrade. Here was a president laying prone, vulnerable under the stars, atop a domestic monument, his raspy breath drifting out over the Potomac.
Open / closed: On a porch, imagination runs wild. It is a place where open-mindedness is not simply being open, but resisting closure: “The mind that is open merely in the sense that it passively permits things to trickle in and through will not be able to resist the factors that make for mental closure.”[25] To illustrate the work of actively maintaining openness, Dewey notes that this is a particular kind of hospitality: “an active desire to listen to more sides than one; to give heed to facts from whatever source they come; to give full attention to alternative possibilities; to recognize the possibility of error even in the beliefs that are dearest to us.” On a porch, we can think; we can also write, talk, watch, sweat, sketch, read, sleep, and paint.
Perhaps Cézanne joins Dewey and Fellows on the porch, setting down his easel just inside the porch’s screen door. I wonder if either ever saw Kerr-Xavier Roussel’s photograph of the painter there in Mont Sainte-Victoire’s shadow, leaning into his canvas, his brush poised, suspended between vision and the next stroke.