Porch Thinking
There is a struggle today over the meaning of the porch — an architectural form and ethos that can be extended to the scale of the neighborhood, city, or nation. For the U.S. Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Places curated a library of nearly 800 books emphasizing the sites of sociable contact where private shades into public and “I” becomes “we.”
In the following annotated Reading List assembled by the Places editors, we’ve highlighted an array of books from PORCH: A Library that are especially useful in defining what the porch means to us — texts that we hope might provide entry points into the larger collection, which remains on view in Venice through November.
Citizen: An American Lyric
Graywolf Press
If the porch is a mediating space between domestic and civic, then in a way it is like the status of citizenship, in the Roman or French Revolutionary sense: a pivot point between the individual and the state, a zone where individuals can meet — and, having met, take up the shared responsibility to make a society. Rankine’s celebrated hybrid book-length poem, with its color photographs and chorus of voices, all exploring the casual devastations of white supremacy, is about that space, that status, and their failures.
Between the World and Me
Spiegel & Grau/Penguin Random House
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s very title, Between the World and Me, describes “porchness,” even as the book demolishes the affable porch of golden-hour lemonade and cottage-core rockers. The power of Coates’s writing lies in his commitment to honesty. All proceeds from specificity, a decision that other writers cast as craft technique, but Coates treats as an ethical imperative. To be honest about what lies “between the world and me” is to be willing to speak — directly, clearly, precisely — of extraordinary violence, and violence of the kind that requires many collaborators, Coates’s readers included.
Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource
Penguin Random House
The American porch was invented by wealthy colonists who “privatized the Renaissance portico,” writes journalist Sam Bloch. His deep history of shade – which originated as an article on Places – aspires to return shelter and sociability to the public realm, with examples that range from the sidewalk arcades of Bologna, to shade sails over market streets in Damascus and Seville, to bus stops in Los Angeles and greenways in Portland. In the shade, “we think more clearly. We see better. In a physiological sense, we are ourselves again.”
Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape
Trinity University Press
This is a reference book that belongs in a library on the porch, next to the swing: a gentle glossary with hundreds of geographic terms, defined by dozens of nature writers, to help us “speak more accurately, more evocatively, more familiarly about the physical places we occupy.” We might wish to inhabit those places, but occupy is the right word. Home is a complicated thing. This book is for settlers who could stand to learn a few things about the continent they have claimed.
How to Do Nothing
Melville House
A porch can be a venue for sociable contact, but perhaps just as importantly, it can offer a shelter for connection with ourselves — active reflection embedded in, yet at a slight remove from, our frenzied, distracted, and over-committed world. Odell’s How to Do Nothing encourages us to be generous to the people and places around us, to be unproductive in public space, to invite conviviality not only with other human beings but with nature, too. We cannot do any of this, Odell argues, until “ we meet each other there on the level of attention.”
The Sum of Us
One World
McGhee considers how zero-sum thinking has turned valuable public goods into private luxuries. Take, for example, the demise of public swimming pools, once a well-funded public resource in segregated white towns. When ordered to integrate in the mid-20th century, many towns opted to drain their pools rather than let Black visitors swim too. This idea that progress for one group can only come at the expense of another is manifest across American public policy, McGhee argues, from healthcare to education to labor rights. Her admonishment of “drained-pool politics” can be read as an argument for more venues where “I” becomes “we,” more ideas invigorated by our shared commitments to one another — that is, more porchness.
One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
MIT Press
What is public space, and how do you make an art work “specific” to such a setting? What does it mean to “respond to” or be “determined by” a particular location? This book is a landmark critical history of site-specific installation work by artists in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Along the way, it is a history of sculpture and performance as they have sought to foster participation, activate community, create emplacedness, and help people feel that they own their blocks and parks and cities.
The Triumph of Injustice
W. W. Norton and Company
This is a book about taxes — a counter-intuitive selection, you might think, for a reading list about the meaning of the porch. But it is also a manifesto for what the authors call “fiscal democracy” — and thus a timely addition to a library that prompts us to understand the porch as a space for “democratic encounter.”
Saez and Zucman, frequent collaborators of Thomas Piketty no less, get right to the point: the tax system is “the most important institution of any democratic society.” They argue persuasively that our democracy depends upon progressive taxation; and more, that “without taxes there is no cooperation, no prosperity, no common destiny.” And they remind us that Franklin Roosevelt sought to mandate a “legal maximum income” as a hedge against anti-democratic concentrations of wealth and power, and that our current president has boasted that he is “smart” to dodge paying taxes.
House
Houghton Mifflin
Tracy Kidder’s House is about the building of a single house—an accurate enough sentence, so long as the reader understands all that is entailed in building a house: plans and money, errors and argument, skill and weather, pace and personality. Construction may not be the usual stuff of storytelling, but Kidder, a master craftsman of nonfiction, shows that perhaps it should be. His deep attention to every aspect of the process yields a single indelible takeaway: structures are built (just as books are written) through choice after choice after choice.