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A dwelling should not be a retreat from space, but life in space. L. Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision
Sponsored by the Weyerhaeuser Giving Fund’s 3 x 30 Sustainability Ambition, the project emerged from this foundation’s grant to develop affordable housing that serves the challenges particular to rural timber land communities. These intersectional challenges in housing are related to affordability, flexible functionality for various household types (e.g., intergenerational, cooperative, live-work), and social isolation. The hyper-porch moves beyond the porch’s accessory function giving a complex of buildings added social functionality. As a timber holding company, Weyerhaeuser is interested in wood’s role in achieving community resiliency.
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The hyper-porch is a prototype that proposes a new unit of urbanism between the individual building and the block with multiplier planning advantages. Agnostic about residential type, mix, and density, the hyper-porch may be scaled and replicated to structure rural pocket neighborhoods, town blocks, and/or larger planning aggregations. Regardless of housing type, the hyper-porch ensures good rural or town space through vital building frontage in shaping public space. Most importantly, 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.
Hyper-porch integrates two seemingly unrelated interests: use of prefabricated mass timber technology using SIPs (Structural Insulated Panels) for house construction with new social arrangements in residential planning. SIPs employs wood waste to create panels superior in their energy footprint to standard light wood framing, with less material waste and construction time, and far greater durability and acoustic performance (good for compact high-density housing). SIPs can readily achieve Passive House standards. Its heat recovery systems filter interior air—an excellent climate adaptation strategy for forested areas prone to wildfires. Hyper-porch proposals are currented being exhibited in the U.S. Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale Di Venezia.
Rather than conceptualize the porch as a superadded element attached to a house, the porch is rescaled and foregrounded to shape housing. 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 crises 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 argued 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 offers new possibilities in conviviality that support greater utility and social forms without dictating social arrangements. It helps populations overcome nature and social deficits necessary in addressing climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. What new relationships, functions, and forms of life may emerge within a new metabolism stimulated through the hyper-porch?
Planning is sponsored by Weyerhaeuser's 3 by 30 Sustainability Ambitions program, which focuses on three areas in which the program can make a meaningful difference by 2030: climate solutions, sustainable homes and rural communities.
The University of Arkansas Community Design Center is an outreach center of the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design, and one of a few university-based teaching offices in the United States. Originated in 1995, the center advances creative development in Arkansas through design, research, and education solutions. Nationally recognized for public-interest design, the center has its own downtown facilities and five professional design/planning staff. Supporting its focus on urbanism, the UACDC has developed eight place-making platforms to shape civic design and public policy at state and municipal levels. These interdisciplinary platforms include ‘missing middle housing,’ ‘agricultural urbanism,’ ‘transit-oriented development,’ ‘context-sensitive street design,’ ‘watershed urbanism,’ ‘watershed urbanism,’ ‘sprawl repair,' ‘wood urbanism,’ and ‘low impact development,’ vocabularies which are locally articulated but hold universal currency.
