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. Davida Rochlin, architect.
As family members gathered on the backyard patio of our niece one evening, talk turned to the pleasures of eating outside in such a serene setting. It wasn’t long before we were debating the differences in terminology about patio, porch, deck, veranda. They all serve the same purpose. Yet always with words, each carries its own connotation of place and time.
Technically, the differences in porch, veranda, patio and deck are the building materials, roof or no roof, and the option of being attached to a building or free standing. While we Americans can immediately visualize both the difference and purpose in each word, imagine the confusion that so many terms for similar structures cause visitors to our lands.
“Porch”, derived from the Latin “porticus” and Greek “portico”, is defined as “a covered area adjoining an entrance to a building and usually having a separate roof.” A patio - “a paved outdoor area adjoining a house.” A deck - “a roofless, floored structure, usually made of wood, typically with a railing and adjoining a house.” A veranda - “a porch along the outside of a building, sometimes partially screened in.” In Italy, this attachment to a house is called a piazza; in Hawaii, a lanai. Then, there are colonnades, stoops, and gazebos.
Aficionados of Southern literature instinctively know that verandas belong to plantation homes only. And movies have reinforced the notion that stoops beckon city folk out of their apartment complexes on warm evenings. Our niece’s covered patio attached to her home in California would be called a back porch here in the South.
To see how porches have shaped our collective psyche, Google porch, front porch and back porch. Across the country, restauranteurs have chosen these old fashioned terms to name their modern enterprises. A porch conjures up images of simpler times, home cooking, and leisurely dining.
Rochlin who has made porch attachments the signature of her modern day architectural designs, says that the porch will never be what it once was in the past because people today have new needs. However, she continues, this change may actually save the porch, and that a changed porch may help to save us as we adapt to climate change. “Depending on where one orients a porch, it can be a profound insulator in winter and source of shade in summer,” she says.
I’m partial to porches, both from my past and now in my present. Some of my fondest memories of summertime in Texas focus on being able to play barefoot outside after supper long into the dark hours as the hot temperatures began to subside.
Neighborhood children would gather in one yard or another to catch lightning bugs or to play group games. I remember feeling so grown up, yet we knew all of our parents, in those days before air conditioning, were sitting on their own front porches surrounding us. We were safe.
Today, my favorite place at our coastal home, elevated for flood protection, is its low-country, second- story, wraparound porch overlooking Hickory Creek. The segment across the back is a perfect place for reading, watching the daily sunset, and sharing a meal. The front porch which is shadier and cooler, especially late in the day, is a good place for chatting with friends and family and waving to neighbors walking by. These days, I walk laps around the porch. If the weather is bad, I can still walk. Twenty-six laps around the porch equals a mile.
For my husband, the design is practical. Being able to walk up to each window certainly makes it easier for him to board up when hurricane warnings are issued. Our grandchildren, when they were younger, also loved the freedom of walking or running around the house by way of the porch.
As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, Rochlin traveled across the country to study porches of all kinds. She thinks a bartender she met in Madison, Georgia, best summarizes the purpose of the porch. “Land is God-given, a house is man-made and the porch is what ties the man-made to the God-given.”
Amen.
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