Transparent Things, Vladimir Nabokov
I miss having a front porch. My parents’ house had a porch deep
enough to hide from the summer sun or driving rain, but open enough to wave to
passers-by. Its painted wood floor sat four steps up from the front walk, which
stretched about 50 feet from the tree-lined sidewalk. A leisurely pace up the
walk gave you time to put your glass down and prepare to greet a visitor. The
two of you might stand there--you on the porch, they on the bottom step--to
exchange a bit of news. Or they might commit to a proper visit, and make the
four-step climb to join you in a glass of wine. There you could linger, neither
completely inside nor completely outside, but between the two, in a space
designed for just that purpose. The front porch is a liminal space.
A liminal space is a threshold or passage between two
conditions, each of which seems distinct once you’re in them looking back at
the boundary. Liminal spaces signal difference, with all the political
freight that burdens that word, because certain things belong on one side or
the other of the between. It’s tempting to say that a liminal space is neither here nor
there, but there actually is a there there. It is architecture’s responsibility to provide a
place in the between, to amplify and adorn the passage. That’s what stoops,
porches, balconies, and bay windows do. They’re like architectural eyelashes, filtering the people
and particles that pass between public and private, welcome and unwelcome. Public
facing—unlike back yards and decks--they open or close you to the world, screen
intruders, admit air, allow observation without being observed, and they get
dressed up for holidays. They wink and blink, animating the building’s
façade—literally, its face--broadcasting a steady stream of wordless
communication to any onlooker. Eyelash spaces are a mark of architectural
generosity, the gift of liminality that bestows the freedom to engage with the
world on our terms. Watch the parade from your bay window; wave at the world
from your porch; drink coffee on your stoop; bang pots and pans in protest from
your balcony. In a Covid-threatened world, we desperately need places like
these where we can engage with others over distance, to breathe apart together.
They are the only architectural elements that can flirt, that can spark delight in the absent-minded passer-by.
Architecture makes something magical
about dwelling in the liminal, on the porch between sidewalk and living room. By providing these places, these architectural lashes, we
also provide time: places to be between tasks, before and after, to step out on
the balcony, away from the screen. Vladimir Nabokov’s opens his novella Transparent Things suggesting that the
present itself is liminal, and if we could just see the concreteness of the
zones—past and future-- to either temporal side of us, we “might then straddle
the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might
be fun.” Yes, fun. We can design much
better places than seesaws to straddle this middle stretch, between a past fading
to lo-res nostalgia, and a future that has never seemed more uncertain. In the
coming redesign of the world, let’s not forget the subtle social significance
of a little fringe of lashes on our buildings’ faces.