In today’s busy world, the porch is often an afterthought. An entry point to someone’s home, a place to leave muddy boots or wet umbrellas, and the depository for daily deliveries, this simple architectural appendage has become a site for transient activity — and most recently, the inspiration behind the U.S. pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, opened May 10 and running through Nov. 23. Three Seattle-based architecture firms — The Miller Hull Partnership, atelierjones and Olson Kundig — are among the 54 finalists representing the United States at one of the design industry’s most anticipated and prestigious events.
“It’s a huge honor to be representing the U.S.,” said Susan Jones, founder of atelierjones, a firm known for its work with mass timber and prefabricated buildings. “They ran an open call and told us later that they had some 400 firms, universities and community organizations apply.”
The Biennale is hosting 65 national pavilions, each showcasing work — ranging from architectural projects to conceptual installations — from its host country, guided by an individual topic or idea that often relates to the Biennale’s overall theme: “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” Participants in the U.S. pavilion — organized by the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, in collaboration with the DesignConnects consultancy, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art — worked under the theme “PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity.”
“With the advent of air conditioning, we have lost many of these grand ‘porch’ spaces and places for gathering or being together in public,” said Susan Chin, founding principal of DesignConnects and one of the curators of the pavilion. “Today’s architectural landscape would benefit from an awareness of how these spaces function and what they represent.”
For the Seattle participants, the theme came down to opportunities for creating community. Each firm submitted a project that looked at the porch as a welcoming place and a gathering spot where friends, family and neighbors could meet, interact and deepen societal connections.
“It’s such a lovely theme, especially in today’s world,” Jones said. Atelierjones’ submission was a model of the Roundhouse Council | Maidu Youth Educational Center, a 2023 project designed for Greenville, Calif.’s Native Maidu community. The new building — which replaced an after-school center destroyed in the 2021 Dixie fire — was constructed in the style of traditional Maidu roundhouses, modernized with an external steel shell enveloping cross-laminated timber walls and ceilings. Salvaged timber was incorporated into the building as a visual metaphor for the group’s resilience and its communal existence with nature, even in the face of hardship. Jones’ model captures the design in miniature, honing it elegantly to show a cross-section, including the floor pattern, inspired by local weaving traditions, that marks the position of the sun on the summer solstice.
In “Three Porches, Three Scales” by Olson Kundig, the design team, led by firm principal and owner Alan Maskin, looked at the ways in which architectural scale can influence the concept of the porch, using three projects of different sizes. “All of Olson Kundig was engaged in a dialogue about the history and meaning of the American porch,” Maskin said. “It was compelling to apply what is traditionally a residential architecture construct to our work in public spaces.”
“It struck me that porches are often considered ‘leftover’ spaces,” added architectural staff member Jeffrey Richmond, “but they’re truly rich spaces of gathering and connection. It was interesting to realize that across different geographies of the U.S., people shared a common idea of what a porch is and a fondness for what it represents to us.”
The Olson Kundig team created an interactive model in collaboration with Phil Turner, the studio’s “resident gizmologist” (he specializes in kinetic design and fabrication and frequently builds the studio’s proof-of-concept prototypes), combining concepts from three projects: the 2,500-square-foot 242 State Street commercial building, an adaptive reuse project in downtown Los Altos, Calif.; structures throughout the 16-acre campus of Portland’s Leach Botanical Garden; and the Fourth Ward Project, a 1.1 million-square-foot commercial high-rise building on Atlanta’s Beltline.
“It’s an abstraction of the porch and combines three different approaches into one,” said architectural staff member Fiki Falola of the model. “That abstraction invites a sense of discovery, which is exactly the experience we wanted to create for people.”
At Miller Hull, the submission focused on the firm’s Pike Place MarketFront project, an addition to the city’s historical landmark that added a mix of low-income, senior residential housing, commercial and office space, and underground parking. Replacing an empty lot where a building burned down, the new section provides connection between the market and the waterfront. In its model, the firm rendered the cityscape black and the water silver, while the neighborhood extension — and the paths extending to the downtown core — are colored in striking red.
“The theme was immediately intriguing to us as a fundamental building typology we work with a lot,” said Miller Hull senior associate Cory Matteis. “MarketFront is an ideal public example of a place that brings people together for social and cultural events.”
Models were shipped to Arkansas before making their journey to Venice, where they were installed over a week in the U.S. pavilion.
“We hoped to reveal excellence in American architecture and design across all scales, from individual to large practice, and from across the U.S. and its territories,” said Chin. “These three projects from the Northwest exemplify how the contemporary porch draws on its regional history, materiality and architectonic form, and brings it forward to create new models for designers.”
