Newbern Firehouse, Rural Studio / Photograph by Timothy Hursley
The porch remains a place where we can tune ourselves—sometimes ever so subtly—to the many changes around us, as it has also emerged as an unprecedented and indispensable place to witness and to understand climate change. Porches occupy the edges of nature and architecture where outside comes in, hosts meet guests, relaxation joins resilience, and imagination rides frontiers of climate.
Porches: A Photographer’s Portfolio
The PORCH project website in its initial phase of development is framed by a portfolio of photographs provided by the award-winning photographer Timothy Hursley. Working from his studio in Little Rock, Arkansas, Hursley has travelled the United States and the globe, documenting contemporary works of architecture for publications, exhibitions, and museums. Alongside of that practice, however, working in the tradition of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, Tim Hursley has undertaken a more personal series of documentary photographs, drawing upon his experiences of communities, towns and farmlands across the American South. A selection of these images, centered on the porches to be found in these rural places, here provide backdrops to the initial stories we hope to tell in our larger PORCH project: these are porches of family life, of multiple uses and values, of histories and present conditions, of weathering and resilience.
Tim Hursley is an architectural photographer based in Little Rock, Arkansas.
After an apprenticeship, in his hometown of Detroit, with Hungarian architect and photographer Balthazar Korab, his career has centered around contemporary architecture. Hursley has photographed the works of numerous architects, including Moshe Safdie, Frank Gehry, and Marlon Blackwell; his museum commissions range from the Museum of Modern Art to the Guggenheim to the Israel Museum. For thirty years he has documented the projects of the Rural Studio at Auburn University; many of these photographs are chronicled in a series of books on Rural Studio, published by Princeton Architectural Press. With the same press, he also published Brothels of Nevada: Candid Views of America’s Legal Sex Industry. Other notable projects have focused on Andy Warhol’s last factory in New York, polygamist communities in the West, and funeral homes in the rural South. His photographs are interspersed among the projects and essays of the monograph, Radical Practice: The Work of Marlon Blackwell Architects (2022, Princeton Architectural Press).
Hursley spends his free time primarily in the Arkansas Delta, documenting aging main streets, industrial agrarian structures, aerial agricultural landscapes, and duck blinds in the Mississippi Flyway.
https://www.timothyhursley.com/
https://southboundproject.org/photographer/timothy-hursley/
https://placesjournal.org/article/the-sunk-country-arkansas-delta/
A Case for the Porch
Or, rethinking the edges of where we live and what we build
LATELY I’VE BEEN TRYING TO THINK LIKE A PORCH. Trying to think between the natural and the human. Thinking how best to build during a climate crisis. I came across John Cage saying that progress in art “may be listening to nature.” He thought this activity could best play out on a porch, where we can hear nature’s symphony and then breathe our own masterpieces. Can we play our porches like instruments? So that we listen to but also learn from nature?
Doing this will take practice. Porches are good for that too. Charles Mingus played his bass all day on a Los Angeles porch, photographer Paul Strand carefully studied shadows on his Connecticut porch, and writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote on her “veranda,” not far from where I am in Florida.
When we sit on a porch, we’re all engaged in some kind of creative practice. On my porch that overlooks a river, I sit, write, sketch, and wait for things to happen. When I look up at the reflected sunlight and shadows above me, I can hear John Prine sing: “You never know what you’re feeling until you watch the shadows cross the ceiling.”
What I’m feeling is that I’m worried about the future and 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. My imagination runs wild like environmentalist Rachel Carson playing what she called the hunting game from porches. She would listen to nature’s sounds and then either go out and find the source of the sound or imagine what she was hearing. I like how a porch is the jumping off point for both. It makes room for reverie and action, just as it tells stories of joy and urgency—a bright patch of blue sky alongside the undeniable change of climate.
Before the pandemic, much of the news coming from porches was about pirates. Amazon packages arrived and porch pirates helped themselves. With its aging boards and tilting deck, my own porch sometimes feels like a sinking ship, so I was surprised that here in the U.S. we’re actually building more porches. The construction industry reports an increase from 42 to 65 percent in homes built with a porch. Although some are too narrow for a chair, much less a porch swing, and many are now equipped with video doorbells, these numbers point to the porch’s lasting influence. And 78 percent of millennials have said that a front porch is either desirable or essential. Even if this desire is more about the idea of the porch—its symbolism and nostalgia—and even if we think we spend more time outside than we do—it’s actually less than 7 percent of the day, this porch renaissance hints at our openness to the outdoors. It points toward nature.
In the past year, many of us stepped out to the edges of our houses not just to gather up deliveries, but to breathe fresh air, watch neighbors, and maybe even talk to them. Porches became stages for impromptu opera arias and socially distanced jam sessions. Close enough for conversation but far enough for safety, front porches brought people together as if air-conditioning had never been invented.
On a porch, inside can feel like it’s outside. Some say they are the original social media. Posts regularly appeared on Facebook and Instagram with hashtags #porchtrait and #porchportrait with families happily posing for photographs that were public and at the same time self-reflexive. Private lives on display—curated surely, but unmasked nonetheless.
There is no better time to rethink the edges of where we live and what we build. It’s the perfect vehicle to get outside without leaving home. Porches invite nature in. Today, architects talk a lot about building sustainably, and few architectural elements embody the resiliency necessary for the Anthropocene like the porch. We can’t engineer our way out of the climate crisis, and we can’t stop building, but we need to think about building as repairing. In its early use, the word repair meant a return home, and if a porch can help bring us to nature, it should be our new home.
To think like a porch is to witness and to change our point of view. We don’t have to go far because stepping out on a porch brings climate change to us. Strand once said that the world is on our doorstep and artists can find inspiration in the nearest places. Flip that and we’re on the threshold of nature, with water from sea level rise lapping at our porch steps.
A porch is that place where we can stop thinking of nature from our perspective alone, but instead turn the camera on ourselves, take a #porchportrait from nature’s view, post it, and make the changes necessary to continue living on the earth. To think like a porch is to begin repairing our relationship with nature.
From “A Case for the Porch”: Orion Magazine, September 13, 2021
Porch Practice
BY CHARLIE HAILEY
The pandemic renewed the porch’s critical social and environmental roles.
Before the pandemic, porches languished with our preference for the indoors and conditioned air. Most North Americans spent less than 7 percent of their day out-side, where porches lingered as real estate amenities, more about a nostalgic idea and image than an occupiable domestic space, and served as oversized mailboxes on which video doorbells kept watch for porch pirates. But with the onset of COVID-19, many rediscovered porches along with other open-air spaces at building edges. Porches became stages to perform, out-door rooms to breathe fresh air without breaking quarantine, and places to see and be seen and to talk and exchange news about the pandemic. Impromptu opera arias, jazz jam sessions, and poetry readings entertained neighborhoods, as residents momentarily forgot illness and separation to remember connections with nature and people.
During the pandemic, the porch became a method that recalls the work of architects Alison and Peter Smithson: “The porch can be read as an exemplar of a method by which a small physical change—a layering-over of air adhered to an existing fabric—can bring about a delicate tuning of persons with place.”20 How a porch embraces paradox makes that tun-ing possible—mixing inside with outside, public with private. Like masks, porches filter and connect; they are ready-made devices for the contradictions of social distancing, close enough for conversation but far enough for safety. Porches also embody resiliency and hold clues for adapting to change. Just as they shed rainwater, accept winds, and generally temper climate, porches also expose us to climate’s crisis. Stepping out on a porch lays bare climate change and urges action, which is to say a porch is more than method—it is practice.
The pandemic has been a reminder that porches are more than passive attach-ments to supply fresh air, contented sleep, or relaxed conversation. Tuning person and place, they are spaces for radical practice. Unlike the patriarchal house-hold, bell hooks identifies the porch as “a democratic meeting place, capable of containing folks from various walks of life, with diverse perspectives.” 21 For her, this “free-floating space” is “a small everyday place of antiracist resistance” where she and her sisters and mother could “prac-tice the etiquette of civility” in the face of racism.22 Porches anchor practices amid social reckoning, environmental crisis, and the pandemic’s many displacements of body and community. Remember the gratitude shown to healthcare workers from porches, balconies, and open win-dows? A porch enables ethical practice and active reflection; it is a tuning place of resilience and resistance. On the porch, we can take a hard look at systemic flaws in society and consider how that warmer breeze we feel on our skin blows across a changing planet.
Charlie Hailey is an architect, a professor at the University of Florida,
and the author of The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature (2021).