A Porch: Home Improvement or Architecture? – Will Morgan, Architecture Critic
Saturday, May 23, 2020
Ever since we moved to Providence over twenty years ago, my wife Carolyn has wanted a screened-in porch.
Last year she finally built her dream, and now we are using it as an extended refuge in a time of pandemic.
Unless it is a cottage by the shore, where ocean breezes chase away the mosquitos, Rhode Islanders are not big on porch living, screened-in or otherwise.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTLots of Providence houses have ceremonial entrance porches of some kind, but these are not places to hang out.
Porches have become vestigial domestic elements for families who access their homes through the ever-more-important garage. Perhaps the porch's main function is as a drop off platform for Amazon deliveries?
The climate here of long winters discourages reading, napping, or dining outside (although television and air conditioning drove Americans indoors everywhere).
Every year I have to remind Carolyn that spring in New England is both late and short. (As we said of spring in college, "Last year we played baseball that afternoon.")
Even so, there are no sweeter summers anywhere, and one wants to experience those without being carried off by insects. So, my bride was determined to add an outdoor room to our 1915 vicarage on the East Side.
Had Carolyn not been raised in very modest means in rural North Carolina, she might have had a career as a professional architect.
But she knows building, and she was the contractor for the restoration of our house back at the turn of this century.
Our crew back then was led by a young roofer and carpenter named Michael Perez. Two decades later, with a lot more experience, Michael was back to construct Carolyn's design for her dream porch.
Continually offended by the poor quality of new residential construction on the East Side, Carolyn worked with the team, a sort of quality control.
Historian William Wallace's description of Michelangelo as an architect who "had learned that translating design into structure required constant decisions, innumerable adjustments, and frequent intervention," could also describe Carolyn.
Offering fewer places to hide, a small project is often harder to get right, while designing for oneself can most the most revealing of the designer's intentions and philosophy. Carolyn saved until she could afford the best materials: Garapa flooring, cedar timbers, and a standing-seam tin roof (she wanted to remember the sound of rain on a tin-roofed house in her Carolina youth).
Here, with the structure exposed, the proportions could not be hidden. This porch required the straightforwardness of a utilitarian but timeless agricultural shed. There are no fancy coverings, no gimmicks, just a sense of repose and quiet achieved by a rightness of materials, craft, and scale.
Still, the question that we are most often asked about the new porch is, will we close it in? Also, will it have heat and insulation? Can we use it in the winter? No, no, and no.
Our eight-by-fourteen feet screened-in porch was designed to be nothing more than an extension of the house to the outside–a place offering protection and exposed to nature and open to the vagaries of weather.
The pre-eminent English architectural historian, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, famously declared that Lincoln Cathedral was architecture, but a bicycle shed was a building. Carolyn's porch, however, refutes that: Good architecture is not about expense or pretense, but about providing shelter with aspiration.
William Morgan's latest book, Snowbound: Dwelling in Winter, will be published by Princeton Architectural Press this October.
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- A Porch: Home Improvement or Architecture? – Will Morgan, Architecture Critic
