The idea in the architectural imaginary of a transitional, roofed and semi-enclosed space between a building’s interior and the world gave civilization the portico, the loggia, and the veranda, but this particular design feature seems to have evolved into something experientially distinct in the modern, southern United States. The historical and cultural factors which shaped “the South” – from its genesis and growth as a result of agricultural prowess and the transatlantic slave trade, to its identity being irrevocably tied to the American Civil War and that conflict’s bloody legacy of racial discrimination and more than a century of struggle over extending citizenship to its African American populations – loom large over everything the U.S. South is, especially its art and architecture. The porch, the South’s architecture of residential stagecraft, is both a setting for life’s little melodramas and itself an actor, anthropomorphically performing within the theaters of a regional, small-town, or rural existence.
Beginning with its stepped elevation off ground level, the porch announces from the front yard a phenomenological realignment, from scant turfgrass, flowerbeds lined in white-washed cobblestones, and brick-laid pathways to wooden steps and lumber decking and roofing. The mind and body prepare to reorient themselves upon entering its domain, not only in terms of physically climbing up to a slightly elevated height, but psychologically recalibrating from the public realm to the quasi-public sphere, or the liminal zone that, as discussed below, is the porch.
“Porch and Drawl,” in Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, eds., Miranda Lash and Trevor Schoonmaker (Durham, NC: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2016), 106-119.
