A porch is an intermediate place – partly inside, partly outside, perched between private and public. The word comes from the ancient Latin (it is linked to the term “portico”, a formal entrance with columns) but there is nothing more traditionally American. In the South, in particular, this is where people watch the world pass, and sometimes welcome it.
It is also the theme of the American pavilion at the Venice architecture of this year: Porch: a generosity architecture. A little unusual for an exhibition on the international biennial circuit, the project was organized in the American heart – especially in the northwest of Arkansas, a place that coastal types can consider as neither here nor there. The co-communique of the pavilion, Peter Mackeith, argues that Arkansas is an ideal point of view, located in the center of the country and rich in vernacular buildings. We can say that these structures tell us what people want and really need, as opposed to what architects think they have.
Frank Lloyd Wright, for his part, rejected the porch as a conservative snapshot, “this curse of the American house”. But it is common for a good reason. In practice, it gives access to the shadow and fresh air; Socially, this is where the barriers decompose. “Verandas and Porches were made so that women have an outdoor space to occupy,” wrote the author born in Kentucky in his 2009 book Membership. “Going out on the porch was to see and see, so as not to hide anything. This reported a desire to be known. “
Mackeith is now dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design at the University of Arkansas, but he spent much of his career in Scandinavia; He also organized the Nordic pavilion for the Biennale in 2012. Its two co-commissioners are Susan Chin, a much appreciated town planner and director of the Conseign Connets Consulting Company, and Rod Bigelow, Executive Director of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, an institution dedicated to the meeting accessible to the widest public. “We are an organization centered on the community,” says Bigelow about the Museum of Bentonville, Arkansas, “with several entries. We consider ourselves a great porch. “
The pavilion itself was completely transformed, as it was also, at a spectacular effect, by artists Simone Leigh and Jeffrey Gibson in the Biennials of Art 2022 and 2024. (The consensus seems to be that the existing pavilion, an essay in the Palladianism of the 1930 manuals, is better treated as an architecture than architecture.) For this year, the three co-communctors Theme in part by inviting many others to join the effort. They asked the eminent architect Marlon Blackwell, who also taught at the University of Arkansas, to create a temporary dramatic projection at the front. Although very proportioned, it is indeed like a porch, with a vocabulary of wooden slats. The addition creates a spacious gathering space which will be scheduled throughout the summer with discussions, music, group meals and other events.
Also in the pavilion design team are two landscape architects, Julie Bargmann of Dirt Studio, in Virginia, and Maura Rockcastle, of Minneapolis Practice Ten X Ten; And an industrial designer, Stephen Burks, whose furniture and sculptural objects will fill out outdoor and interior spaces. In a project they call Objects of belonging – The nod to Bell Hooks is intentional – Burks and its partner Malika Leiper orchestrated a partnership between the Milanese textile firm in and Sew Gee's Heritage Builders, based in the city of Alabama renowned for its community of Quiltmakers. In the donation of luxurious velvet and other Italian luxury fabrics – completely new materials for the gee bend quilters, which they duly cut and glued in brilliantly improvised compositions.
The many other exhibitors in the pavilion, 54 in total, were identified by an open call. All illustrate an aspect of the “porch” and they come from the whole country; Only the projects built completed since 2000 have been accepted. As is generally the case with such inclusive exercises, the parameters have often been tested. Do the “streetries” that appeared during the pandemic, transforming urban streets into outdoor catering places, count like Porches? Chin thought they should and invited the New York City Ministry of Transport to submit a presentation on the subject.
At the other end of the spectrum are urban development transformative projects, in which the porch is interpreted on a large scale. Tom Lee Park in Memphis, completed in 2023 – a collaboration between Jeanne Gang's studio and the Architects Scape landscape – presents a “canopy at sunset” which provides a public gathering space right next to the Mississippi shore. In St Louis, Studio James Carpenter and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates have created a new entrance to the Eero Saarinen Passerelle Arc, reorienting the emblematic monument to the city via a circular pocket park.
True to the intermediate nature of the porch, it is perhaps the medium size projects of the pavilion that most fully embody the potential of the typology. Bennie G Thompson Academic and Civil Rights Research Center in Tougalo, a historically black college in Mississippi, has a complex program including a conference room, a museum space, archives and classrooms. It was designed by the architectural office of Jackson, Duvall Decker, being mainly a gathering space, with a beautiful covered gateway extending the entire length of its brick facade, opening the building on the campus. The company based in Seattle, Atelierjones, was selected for its houses in Sierra, replacing hundreds of houses lost to forest fires in Greenville, California. Essentially emergency housing, mass wood buildings are nevertheless beautiful, especially because their asymmetrical roof porches evoke an instantaneous sense of the community.
The Sierra Houses project is one of the many presented in the pavilion which deal with the reality of climate change, a consideration always present for contemporary architecture. The writer Charlie Hailey, in his essay in 2021, “a case for the porch”, reflects that “sitting on a porch calms me but it also makes me anxious, because here, on the edge of the house, nature tells how everything changes”. Global warming could soon lead to migration north of the porches, as well as people; We are all going to need more shade. The elevation of a porch from the ground, which establishes a raised level for the entire ground floor of a building, also has advantages in areas threatened by floods and sagging-a subject not familiar in Venice.
The pavilion has been planning for years, and it arrives at a strange moment. The principle of generosity is first at ease alongside the doctrine of America, and of current American policies on immigration, prices and the financing of the arts. (For what it is worth, the co-commissions have only good things to say in the State Department, which helps to administer the pavilion; they affirm that there has been no effort to censor the content, or otherwise interfere.) We probably make these political circumstances all the more timely. It is good to remember that the Americans have a long history of offering each other, and that this instinct is deeply inscribed in its built environment, from one ocean to another and everywhere between the two.
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