M6| Friday, September 13, 2019 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
COMPARISON SHOPPING
Watching the World Go By
The popularity of porches has waned over time, but they’re still the place to catch a breeze
T
here is perhaps no architectural feature
that conveys a sense of home, warmth and
community like the front porch. And yet,
what was once a staple of American life is
often skipped in modern homes. What hap-
pened to the porch?
“It’s sociological, it’s aesthetic, technological, it has
all the different aspects of life,” says Renee Kahn, a his-
toric preservationist and retired art history professor
who, with the architectural designer Ellen Meagher,
wrote the 1990 book “Preserving Porches.” She explains
that the porch became possible after the Industrial
Revolution when manufacturing made prefabricated
parts easy to come by. The growth of leisure time in
the 1800s made the idea of a place to relax and social-
ize particularly appealing.
Porches became a staple of Southern architecture in
part because of the respite they provided from stifling
heat. “The first porch buildings in the U.S. had more to
do with climate, with environment, than social issues,”
said architect and University of Miami professor Eliza-
beth Plater-Zyberk. She adds that porches shaded the
house walls, which meant less heat inside the home in
the pre-air-conditioning era. Porches also acted as a
cool, outdoor living space, she said.
But, starting with the invention of the automobile, it
became less attractive to sit outside, says Professor
Plater-Zyberk. “The fumes, the noise. Up until then, you
could sit on a porch at night and chat with your neigh-
bors. It was social. It was pleasant,” she says. Once autos
showed up, people began building side porches instead
of front porches, she says, but then “with air condition-
ing and television, the whole thing disappears all to-
gether. That marks the end of the porch.”
Professor Plater-Zyberk believes that the front porch
fuses a connection between homeowners to their neigh-
bors and those passing by on the street. “I think part of
what people have feared in the last number of decades is
the loss of the sense of community because we’re always
in our car or in front of the TV. We’ve lost the activities,
especially connected to walking, which enables us to fos-
ter human relations that are informal and supportive in
that manner that’s now called connectivity,” she says.
“It was really a social necessity at one point. I don’t
see them anymore on the new buildings that are going
up and if they’re there, nobody sits on them,” says Ms.
Kahn. She advocates that existing porches never be re-
moved from homes. “My analogy is, you take a porch
off of the front of a house and it’s like shaving off
somebody’s eyebrows,” she says. “It’s a key form of
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