Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com
How do you have closeness to neighbours but still feel comfortably away? How can you be friendly but not so friendly, and still maintain the necessary “physical distancing”?
In many ways the porch, the entrance way to many older homes and one of the components brought forward “providing eyes on the street” is making a comeback. The porch has been described as an essential feature in neotraditional communities like Celebration Florida that aims to bring neighbours closer together.
And it does not need to be a real porch either~I am hearing the discussion of virtual porches on webinars as web based places where people can congregate and have a chat.
As Donna Liquori describes in the New York Times “the porch fell out of favour with the advent of air-conditioning in the 1950’s, replacing the porch which was traditionally the place where “people gathered and cooled off”. Porches are now back to places of socialization and relaxation, and surprisingly are being valued more than a backyard deck for that aspect of human contact and exchange with passersby.
As Liquori states ” the privacy of the back of the house is not what I crave right now. Even just seeing other people from afar has given us a boost. We want to see our friends and neighbors. We miss them.”
The porch is also being described as a social vehicle, with the concept that people walking in the public realm feel as comfortable doing that as on their front porch.
Photographer Roger Hoover was one of the first of a series of photographers who with their businesses shuttered by the corona virus commenced photographing residents. Neighbours are asked to stand on their front stoops and porches for a photograph. Hoover’s work documents the isolation of families who cluster to pose for the camera, and also reinforces the importance of the porch as a welcome semi-private space, in Covid times, providing separation but still part of the street life of the neighbourhood.
You can see an ABC News clip below of Hoover’s Porch Project.
Hi Sandy,
I really appreciated your article on the comeback of the front porch. I’d love to see a follow-up on this topic as it relates to Vancouver architecture and the planning department’s approval of single family residential designs with pseudo front porches. For the past decade or so one of the architectural trends in single family residential homes that I’ve seen has been to design houses with very shallow front porches that area not actually functional. In an elevation drawing it looks like a normal front porch with a railing, but in reality these “front porches” are only 1′-2′ deep – not big enough to even stand there much less put a chair. I think the loss of the “usable” front porch is a detriment to our neighbourhoods. Planners and architects need to understand the importance of this front porch function. I would like to see City Hall relax the front yard setback requirements to allow for deeper, more people-friendly front porches. I believe this would do wonders for improving our neighbourhoods. I’d be curious to hear what others have to say about this topic.
Porches have been indispensable these past few months – the older neighborhood in which I am fortunate to live has wonderful porches and neighborhood interaction. Unfortunately, despite a well-intentioned Zoning Bylaw review that the City of Vancouver is currently undertaking in order to streamline and simplify the bizarrely convoluted and expensive building permit process, a decision has been reached to retain the punitive Floor Area requirements minimizing and restricting allowable porch area in the typical RS zones. This is why we haven’t seen decent porches since the RS bylaws were drafted in the 60’s.
As the decision stands, exterior porches are only allowed to be up to 5% of the allowable FSR – meaning that a typical house would only be allowed to have a porch about 3′-6″ deep if it’s as wide as the house – much too shallow for real use. Unfortunately this has resulted in whole neighborhoods with either partial porches or no porch with a house that turns it’s back to the street.
In a rainy place like Vancouver we should be allowed to have deep porches. Most days in the winter here are relatively mild but wet. With the right clothes and rain cover it’s totally fine to sit outside. They should change this bylaw.
If someone wants to build a porch that is larger than what is allowed by the zoning bylaw, they always have the option to apply for a variance.
Not likely to succeed though. Most variances are only granted if there is some particular circumstance of the property that makes compliance unreasonable.
I’m going to strike a contrarian note here. When neo-traditional home design came back into fashion in the 90s, porches made a come-back here too. But the sources of those traditional home designs came from places that had hot summers in an era before air conditioning. The design sources are mostly Ontario, the US Midwest, California and British India. The deep porch was necessary in those areas because the hot summer demanded an outdoor living area. But these designs cannot be transported to this climate without some modification. As we all know, we have low light winters. A deep porch puts the room behind into deep shadow, too deep when light levels are already low. Great Britain has a similar climate to ours, and the traditional residential forms do not have deep porches. They aren’t needed for the climate and the cut out an unacceptably large amount of light. In Britain the conservatory is the choice for outdoor-indoor living, and we might take heed.
However, none of this is meant to support the idea of high rise apartments without balconies. Those balconies are never deep, and high rise apartments need to have some ability to access the outdoor air.