Back to the Front Porch

A couple of months ago, Forbes ran a short piece on how COVID-19 is expected to change the home. One of the most striking aspects of the article was that all eight of the thought leaders primarily aimed their insight at physical changes to the house. From germ-resistant countertops, isolation rooms, greater video interface capacity, and package drop-off points, the agreed-upon direction of how the home was changing was to move toward a more efficient and sanitary aesthetic.

One suggestion from the Forbes bit pointed in a different direction and highlighted a potential change in how people are going to view their relationships with their neighbors. What Dan Buettner, founder of Blue Zones foresees is a prioritizing of either balconies or front porches. In so many ways, this suggested movement towards the re-acquisition of front porches is a major counter-cultural move, but one that could possibly pair well with what Americans are learning in their season of being involuntarily grounded.

The home, for many, has been merely a place for sleeping and occasionally eating. Most children have schedules that are paired to match those of their working parents and the result is that subsequent interests and social circles develop out of the overflow of the necessary ones of work and school. What follows is that most members of the family are hardly ever home. Until now.

Because the COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders extended far beyond the shelf life of snowstorms, chickenpox, or whatever else might typically keep people homebound, a number of Americans were forced to realize that they hadn’t created homes for themselves that actually could handle being lived in well. How many people in the last few months have realized they didn’t own baking sheets, a mixer, or enough outdoor chairs? As families geared up to settle in, many realized they should have done this a long time ago. As most gardeners know, seeds, at the beginning of summer, were almost as hard to come by as spring chickens. People are beginning to seriously use their homes.

This makes Buettner’s vision of a front porch boom a most interesting forecast because, if it is an absence of truly human-to-human relationships that is giving birth to a neo-culture of the home, then front porches could quite possibly mark a significant shift in outlook. To move back to the front porch could precipitate a repudiation of false place-holders for seeing and being seen which are offered in virtual social platforms.

Architectural historian, Ted Roberts, explains how from the period of the Revolutionary War to the 1920s the front porch experienced a heyday, not only as a liaison between uncut nature and the structured civilization of the inner house but also as a platform for the true social network of incarnate human interaction. What changed? New media.

With the advent of the automobile and air-conditioning, people no longer wanted or needed to sit outside. As people began, through radio, television, and the internet, to think of themselves as being connected to a much bigger world, their immediate contexts began to shrivel up and die. What was happening across the globe was too pressing to pay attention to what was happening across the street.

Architecturally speaking, the few porches remaining moved to the backyard because . . . well . . . what anyone is doing outside is no one else’s business. And so, with the loss of accountability in our viewing and being viewed, digitally based voyeurism and exhibitionism became the over-extensions that rushed to fill the void.

But now that everyone has been sent to their rooms, it seems as though the grounding may have worked. Post-quarantine dinner plans are booming. Living rooms are being lived in, kids are eating meals at the table with their parents, and some people don’t want to go back to the way things were. Some people are making plans to add a front porch. They are trading in the profile pic for the real thing.

In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson edited and wrote for a periodical called The Rambler. Some consider it a prototype for the blog. In Essay No. 68, when speaking about hypocrisy and our true selves, Johnson said, “To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends . . .”. It’s not just that being home and doing it well is hard work, but that it is also, in many ways, the raison d'être of work in the first place. Opening our homes to our neighbors, which is the posture of the front porch, is the perfect place to start.