Architectural Eyelashes

“Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun. But the future has no such reality (as the pictured past and the perceived present possess); the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought.”     

                                                                              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.