In mid-August, AN broke the news that the U.S. Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale will be co-commissioned by the Fay Jones School at the University of Arkansas, DesignConnects, and Crystal Bridges Museum. (AN is the exhibition’s media partner.) The project stands to evocatively explore the porch as an architecture of generosity.
Knowing the widespread usage of this architectural element, my mind wandered to some of the porches I’ve known. There was the one at my grandparents’ house outside of Baltimore where we’d sometimes sit in the cool evenings during our summer visits. Or the deep, wide one that wrapped around the front of a Victorian house my parents rented in Illinois, which offered a concealed outpost for snowball fights. Or, later, the smaller, brick-floored entrance to my parents’ suburban home in Texas: On Halloween my father would lug the electric piano out there and then, wearing a tuxedo and a goblin mask, sit silently, only to lurch into motion to play the opening of J. S. Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” on the organ when kids approached. It scared the crap out of the trick-or-treaters.
My memory also holds more useful civic entries: In Houston, hangouts were conducted under the overhangs of the Menil Collection’s original building or, later, the outdoor rooms of its nearby Drawing Institute. Porches merge with martial arcades at the U-shaped barracks turned galleries at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, where I interned. And there were the childhood waits to be seated at Cracker Barrel mid-road trip; we’d pass the time on rocking chairs on the chain restaurant’s porches, looking out across the parking lot and the roaring highway beyond.
Americans didn’t invent this architectural type, but the porch has a constant presence across our cultural history. It plays a central, metaphorical role in Reinhold Martin’s recent critique of the New Right published in Places Journal: Political theorist Patrick J. Deneen seizes on the social transition from front porch to backyard patio as “proof of liberal modernity’s spiritual impoverishment.” There are even medical dimensions to the porch’s relevance, as chronicled in an essay about the space’s “magical in-betweenness” by David Owen for The New Yorker.
The porch also raises questions of labor and race. When thinking about the topic, my mind recalled a powerful image of the so-called African House, built by enslaved people on Melrose Plantation near Natchitoches, Louisiana, in the early 1800s and now part of the Cane River National Heritage Area. The building’s most distinctive feature is its massive overhanging roof. Beyond being used for storage, the structure was also used as a jail, according to John Michael Vlach, who included it in his 1993 book Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. A 1973 report detailed its construction, with its “bottom floor of massive slave-made bricks, its second floor of heavy, hand-hewn timbers, mortised and dovetailed together without the use of nails, and its fascinating hip roof of cypress shingles that supports a 12-foot overhang.” It also described the building as an enigma: “No records remain which authoritatively date its construction, no records remain which identify its function.”
In the early 20th century, Cammie Garrett Henry turned Melrose into a retreat for artists. Clementine Hunter, a Black woman, worked there as a farmhand, maid, and cook before beginning to paint using leftover material from a visiting painter. In 1955, at the age of 68, she painted murals on the walls of the upper floor of the African House that capture early 20th century life on the plantation.
A 200-year-old building doesn’t survive without preservation. The roof was “rehabilitated…using fresh-cut Louisiana cypress logs” in 2015; in the following year, the brickwork was restored and Hunter’s murals were returned to their original venue. There is more to learn from this structure, whose distinctive architecture makes it worth appreciating today.
What do porches have to do with sustainability, a constant theme of this September issue? “Porches are inseparable from their environment,” architect Charlie Hailey wrote at the start of The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature. The porch holds a space for meetings—of ideas, airs, peoples, aesthetics, and stories. As our planet warms, we will need more—and better—porches.
In this issue, writers grapple with issues of climate, from criticism to coverage of new start-ups, circular building economy efforts, adaptive reuse projects, degrowth, mass timber, and much more. Finally, read an excerpt of Christopher Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots, out this month, which explores the resilient potential of the “ruined” spaces of our cities.
