Variations on a Porch

Davida Rochlin said, “Nobody thought much about the front porch when most Americans had them and used them. The great American front porch was just there, open and sociable, an unassigned part of the house that belonged to everyone and no one, a place for family and friends to pass the time.” The landscape in which those porches existed has changed. Our traditional views of housing and neighborhoods (single family homes with a cul-de-sac at the end) really aren’t the norm anymore. In the last 10 years more Americans have moved to, and are living in cities than in the past (Lamber, Lisa 2012). Currently, 80.7% of Americans live in urban areas, up 1.7% from 2000 (Lamber, Lisa 2012). With this migration, there has been a surge in renovated, multi-family housing. While this does solve the problem of allowing more families to move back into urban areas, these buildings often have no sense of community or neighborhood. You don’t have neighbors, you simply live next to people. The porch used to be a symbol of community, a sociable space. Neighbors would sit outside and watch kids play and catch up with each other. But both technology and our own self-imposed isolations have lead us to slowly loose touch with our physical neighbors. The intention of this project is to create a community, a neighborhood, within a single building housing multiple families through porches and their variations