Porches of North America

1. History

With a history that can be traced to antiquity , a wide variety of porches, including porticos, piazzas, and verandas, blossomed forth as forms of architectural plumage in North America more than two centuries ago. As places to greet the world, as shelters to celebrate arrivals and departures, and as outdoor living spaces, few architectural features evoke such rich feelings, as do porches. By their location, design, and associations, porches and porticos may provide expressions of access and engagement, of exclusion and defense, of willingness and hope, of power and authority, or of style, taste, and personality. And as transitional realms that straddle thresholds betwixt and between indoors and out, between private and public, and even perhaps between sacred and secular, porches may host many curiously memorable activities, experiences, and impressions. The historical roots of this building feature are complex. Some observers have attempted to explain the history of porches in practical terms as structures erected to fill human needs through innovation and adaptation. Others have traced historical links that may demonstrate how such building forms as porches reflect the diffusion of knowledge conveyed through cultural contacts. Both approaches of inquiry have merit. Evidence suggests that many indigenous peoples in North, Central, and South America were building porchlike structures long before contact with Europeans. Noteworthy surviving examples include the stone porticos , galleries, and colonnades erected by the Mayan cultures in Mexico and Belize from about 500 ce and later.1 Archaeological finds of post holes and post molds show that wooden posts were used by Native American peoples in the History The porch, the veranda, or the piazza, are highly characteristic features, and no dwellinghouse can be considered complete without one or more of them. —A. J. Downing, Cottage Residences, 1842 2 Porches of North America American Southwest for building ramadas , the simple, open shelters supported by poles with roofs of brush or fabric.2 Although these ramadas were often built as freestanding structures, they were also attached to dwellings to serve as porches and as open, sheltered spaces for cooking, eating , and other domestic activities. Archaeological site excavations along the Rio Grande in Texas suggest that ramadas were attached to adobe houses as shade awnings. Radiocarbon tests have dated a collapsed roof of one of these structures—covered with grass, river reeds, sticks, poles, and mud daub—to between 1290 and 1410 ce.3 Examples of Native American dwellings with ramada porches constructed with local materials and traditional methods were documented for the Historic American Buildings Survey during the 1930s, and indeed, Figure฀1.1. For these children blowing soap bubbles, the front porch provided special opportunities for enjoyment and companionship in activities best suited to the home’s liminal space that straddled indoor and outdoor realms. Circa 1890s stereograph. History 3 ramadas are still being built by people in the American Southwest as shade-rendering structures, using materials and techniques similar to those employed long ago.4 Elsewhere, other Native American peoples were constructing shelters with porchlike features before contact with Europeans. According to an early seventeenth-century account written by the French missionary Father Gabriel Sagard, indigenous bands of Huron Indians, also known as the Wendat people, who were then living in what is now central Ontario, built large bark-covered longhouses up to seventy feet in length called ganonchia for winter use. These were equipped at each end with an enclosed porch, called an aque, that was used for storing food and firewood.5 In the 1770s, the English botanist, William Bartram, observed dwellings with porches erected by the indigenous inhabitants of Alabama , including a council house in a Creek Indian town with what he described as a “piazza” in front with pillars formed to look like spotted serpents.6 Even some Inuit peoples of the Arctic regions of Canada and Alaska constructed winter shelters with enclosed porches that served as passageway entrances to provide protection from the cold and from intruders. Examples of these semi-subterranean structures built by the people who have called themselves the Siglit were documented in the Mackenzie Delta region of the Northwest Territories as early as 1865, but based on archaeological evidence, this type of dwelling feature is thought to have roots in technologies developed by people in the Bearing Strait region more than two thousand years ago.7 Thus as one looks across the Americas and beyond to other lands, one finds evidence that simple, open, shade-rendering...