A porch is an in-between place — partly indoors, partly out, perched between private and public. The word comes from ancient Latin (it’s related to the term “portico”, a formal entrance with columns) yet there’s nothing more traditionally American. In the south, especially, it’s where folks watch the world go by, and sometimes welcome it in.
It is also the theme for the US Pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale: Porch: An Architecture of Generosity. Somewhat unusually for an exhibition on the international biennial circuit, the project was organised in the American heartland — specifically in northwest Arkansas, a place that coastal types may regard as itself being neither here nor there. Pavilion co-commissioner Peter MacKeith, however, argues that Arkansas is an ideal vantage point, centrally located in the country and rich in vernacular buildings. Arguably, these structures tell us what people actually want and need, as opposed to what architects think they should have.
Frank Lloyd Wright, for one, dismissed the porch as a conservative cliché, “that curse of the American home”. But it is commonplace for good reason. Practically, it gives access to shade and fresh air; socially, it is where barriers break down. “Verandas and porches were made for females to have outdoor space to occupy,” the Kentucky-born author bell hooks wrote in her 2009 book Belonging. “To come out on the porch was to see and be seen, to have nothing to hide. It signalled a willingness 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 curated the Nordic Pavilion for the Biennale in 2012. His two co-commissioners are Susan Chin, a highly regarded urbanist and principal of the consultancy firm Design Connects, and Rod Bigelow, executive director of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, an institution dedicated to making art accessible to the widest possible public. “We are a community-centred organisation,” Bigelow says of the museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, “with multiple entryways. We think of ourselves as one big porch.”
The pavilion itself has been utterly transformed, as it also was, to spectacular effect, by artists Simone Leigh and Jeffrey Gibson in the 2022 and 2024 Art Biennales. (The consensus seems to be that the existing pavilion, an essay in textbook Palladianism from 1930, is better treated as armature than architecture.) For this year, the three co-commissioners interpreted the theme partly by inviting many others to join the effort. They asked the prominent architect Marlon Blackwell, who also teaches at the University of Arkansas, to create a dramatic temporary projection out front. Though grandly proportioned, it is indeed porch-like, with a vocabulary of wooden slats. The addition creates a capacious gathering space which will be programmed throughout the summer with talks, music, group meals and other events.
Also on the pavilion design team are two landscape architects, Julie Bargmann of D.I.R.T. studio, in Virginia, and Maura Rockcastle, of the Minneapolis practice Ten x Ten; and one industrial designer, Stephen Burks, whose furniture and sculptural objects will populate both the exterior and interior spaces. In a project they call Objects of Belonging — the nod to bell hooks is intentional — Burks and his partner Malika Leiper orchestrated a partnership between the Milanese textile firm Dedar and Sew Gee’s Bend Heritage Builders, based in the Alabama town renowned for its community of quiltmakers. Dedar donated luxurious velvets and other Italian luxury fabrics — materials completely new to the Gee’s Bend quilters, which they duly cut up and collaged into brilliantly improvised compositions.
The many other exhibitors at the Pavilion, 54 in total, were identified by an open call. All exemplify some aspect of “porchness”, and they come from across the whole country; only built projects completed since 2000 were accepted. As is usually the case with such inclusive exercises, the parameters were often tested. Do the “streeteries” that popped up during the pandemic, transforming urban streets into outdoor dining venues, count as porches? Chin thought they should, and invited the City of New York Department of Transportation to submit a presentation on the topic.
At the other end of the spectrum are transformative urban development projects, in which the porch is interpreted at grand scale. Tom Lee Park in Memphis, completed in 2023 — a collaboration between Jeanne Gang’s studio and the landscape architects SCAPE — features a “Sunset Canopy” that provides public gathering space right next to the bank of the Mississippi. In St Louis, Studio James Carpenter and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates created a new entrance to Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch, reorienting the iconic monument towards the city via a circular pocket park.
True to the porch’s in-between nature, it is perhaps the pavilion’s midsized projects that most fully embody the typology’s potential. The Bennie G Thompson Academic and Civil Rights Research Center at Tougaloo, a historically Black college in Mississippi, has a complex programme including a lecture hall, museum space, archive and classrooms. It was designed by the Jackson-based architectural office Duvall Decker to be primarily a gathering space, with a handsome covered walkway extending the full length of its brick façade, opening the building out to the campus. The Seattle-based firm atelierjones was selected for its Sierra Houses, replacing hundreds of homes lost to wildfire in Greenville, California. Essentially emergency housing, the mass timber buildings are nonetheless beautiful, not least because their asymmetrically roofed porches conjure an instant sense of community.
The Sierra Houses project is one of many featured in the pavilion that address the reality of climate change, an ever-present consideration for contemporary architecture. The writer Charlie Hailey, in his 2021 essay “A Case for the Porch”, reflects that “sitting on a porch calms me down but it also makes me anxious, because here, on the house’s edge, nature tells how everything is changing”. Global warming may soon result in a northward migration of porches, as well as people; we’re all going to be needing more shade. A porch’s elevation from the ground, which establishes a raised level for a building’s entire ground floor, also has advantages in areas threatened by flooding and subsidence — a not unfamiliar topic in Venice.
The pavilion has been in the planning for years, and it arrives at a strange moment. The principle of generosity sits uneasily alongside the doctrine of America First, and current US policies on immigration, tariffs and funding for the arts. (For what it’s worth, the co-commissioners have nothing but good things to say about the State Department, which helps to administer the pavilion; they affirm that there have been no efforts to censor the content, or otherwise interfere.) Arguably, these political circumstances make the project all the more timely. It’s good to be reminded that Americans do have a long history of offering one another welcome, and that this instinct is inscribed deeply into its built environment, from coast to coast, and everywhere in between.
porchusavenice2025.org
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