What if multi-family housing design began with the porch; re-scaled as infrastructure where the porch is the generator of urbanism organizing buildings and landscapes? Rather than conceptualize the porch as a superadded element attached to a house, the porch is rescaled and foregrounded to shape housing. The 'hyper-porch' moves beyond the porch’s accessory function to give a complex of buildings added social functionality.

Accordingly, the hyper-porch facilitates sharing economies among households involving the activities of daily living—socializing, cooking/dining, child and senior caregiving, and working—otherwise consigned to private interiors. Indeed, the porch as infrastructure offers the capacity to create forms of alternative living distinguished by cooperativity, greater utility, and elevated social capital without compromising household autonomy and privacy. Cooperative lifestyles are being embraced again by populations of all income groups to counter the economic precarity, social isolation, and the care crisis experienced among rich and poor, young and old, alike. Reframing the porch’s role takes on sociologist Ivan Illich’s challenge to reinvest a social dimension back into the tools of contemporary civilization. As laid out in his now classic text, "Tools for Conviviality," these tools include the building blocks of the built environment: schools, houses, healthcare facilities, cars, highways, etc. Tools, which, Illich argued, are shaped by industrial-era modes of production (and mindsets) characterized by a pathology of privacy and their ever increasing withdrawal from the social. The hyper-porch’s liminality (the space between) offers new possibilities in conviviality that support greater utility and social forms without dictating social arrangements.

The 'hyper-porch' proposes a new unit of urbanism in between the individual building and the block with multiplier planning effects. Agnostic about residential type, mix, and density, hyper-porches may be formed to structure rural pocket neighborhoods, town blocks, and larger planning aggregations. The hyper-porch hastens the waning preference for the detached single-family home as a source of identity and status, re-orienting the focus on overcoming both nature and social deficits. Indeed, the hyper-porch equips communities to better address climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. What new relationships, functions, and forms of life may emerge within a new metabolism stimulated through the hyper-porch?

This project was sponsored, in part, by The Weyerhaeuser Giving Fund's 3x30 Sustainability Ambition program.