Porches are sites of both welcome and resistance. In the following conversation, architect Marlon Blackwell and designer Stephen Burks recount their experience collaborating with TEN X TEN and Julie Bargmann of D.I.R.T. Studio on the creation of PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity for the United States Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Together, they describe how porches serve as key sites for shade, conversation between strangers, and observing "the theater of life," and how PORCH enables these activities for its visitors.

Jessica Gomez Ferrer: To begin, I'm wondering if each of you could share a meaningful experience you've had on a porch, since we're gathering you under the guise of PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity.

Stephen Burks: Well, I happen to have family down in the South even though I'm from Chicago. My ancestors came up in the Great Migration: my father's side from Mississippi, my mother's side from Alabama. And some of them settled in Atlanta. I was down in Atlanta during the High Museum exhibition that we had there in the fall of '22 and I got to spend a little time with my cousin Andrew Young, the former mayor of Atlanta. He happens to be the former ambassador to the United Nations, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr, and all of these things, but it was just such an honor to have some time with him on his front porch. He told us a story of how non-violence in the civil rights movement actually came from the wives of Martin Luther King, Jr and Andrew Young.

In the early days of the civil rights movement, Andrew and his wife, my cousin Jean, were confronted by a group of people who were interested in destroying their home one night. He had a rifle and gave it to Jean and said, “If any of those guys seems like they're going to get out of line or do something unsavory to your husband, I want you to go up in that window upstairs and make sure you get a beat on them." Cousin Jean passed the gun back to him and said, "I will do no such thing. Whoever those men outside are, and whatever they want, they are still children of God, and I won't point a rifle at a child of God, and neither should you as a Baptist minister."

That was the unofficial beginning of the non-violence movement within the civil rights movement, and it is remarkable that I never knew that, and that I heard it directly from my cousin Andrew on his porch in Atlanta.

Marlon: You learn something every day. That's a great story. My story started like this: my family migrated from England in the 17th century to Virginia Tidewaters to North Carolina to Georgia and then out to Alabama. I grew up on military bases but I spent almost every summer in the South, and, of course, had Southern parents. Porches were really important to how we gathered as families and hung out.

The one that sticks in my mind is, in order to go to school at Auburn University — we had a lot of kids and not a lot of money — I had to work to pay my way. But I couldn't afford to work in an architect's office. Instead, I got a job with a publishing company out of Nashville, Tennessee, to sell Bibles door-to-door in the rural South to make the money I could use for the rest of the year to go to school. 

One of the uniting things about all the places I went to was that almost all the business I did was on a porch. I would come to homes in the daytime and often the men would be away working and the women were at home. This was in the '70s. I'd knock on the door and ask to come in, and a lot of times, they would say, "Um." They would hesitate, and I'd say, "Well, we can just sit out on the porch." And that's what we would do.

Why? Well, because this is the theater of life happening, and they could be seen by neighbors. Eyes on the porch. They felt more comfortable because they were in their community rather than in the privacy of their home.

Whether you were poor or you were wealthy, everybody had a porch, so that was one democratic thing going on: the fundamental, civic dignity of the porch. And it is where we really communicated, and it was very comfortable. People don't buy something if they don't like you, so the whole being on the porch was a way to get to know people and put them at ease.

Jessica: Thank you both for those really rich stories. I'm curious if either of you wanted to expand on what the porch symbolizes for each of you.

Stephen: When we first started working on this project, I reflected on the writing of bell hooks, in particular, Belonging: A Culture of Place. bell talks about the importance of the porch, not just as a site of creativity — because you have to remember Black folks were spending a lot of time making things on their porches back in the day — but also as a site of resistance. And so, this idea of Black folks belonging, and beginning to have a sense of community in the Jim Crow South. Spending time on their porches and trying to feel a sense of place, relating to the people around them and their community.

Back to Marlon's example, the porch is that space where you're neither in your private realm nor the public realm, but you're somewhere in-between where you can meet the public, still be yourself, and feel like you belong.

When I think about Cousin Andrew's story, although that didn't happen on a porch, when he told me the story we were sitting on his porch, and I was sitting there looking out at the neighborhood, and getting the impression that, here's a man that still lives humbly regardless of all of his accomplishments. Here's a man that's still sitting on his porch, telling these stories, and still relating to the people around him. Being in the public eye and also having just enough private distance I guess you could say.

Marlon: To me, the porch has always been, from an architectural and social standpoint, the handshake of the building. It welcomes and embraces.

Just about every project we do in the office has a porch. It has become integral to what we do, both as a social construct, but also as an environmental element, too, of cooling, of being in the shade. When we were in Venice, Stephen probably heard me say this 100 times: "Where there's shade, there's people. No shade, no people."

The porch is one of those things that has a great value proposition for any work of architecture because it solves about four or five things with one thing. And that's what the vernacular does; vernacular is what you do when you can't afford to get it wrong. The porch speaks to the resourcefulness of how we must build, in order to build well. 

A porch, to me, is typologically part of who we are as a country in many ways. I think the basic instinct of most people is to be kind to everyone. Colson Whitehead said it beautifully, "Be kind to everybody, make your art, and fight the power."

Now beyond that it gets messy sometimes, but at least from an architectural standpoint, the symbolism to me is that you are welcome. It's like rolling out the carpet. That's the intention and then it's up to us as people to manifest that in our own behavior.

Stephen: The idea of the porch being a welcoming space, historically speaking, is a little bit complicated if we think about the plantation, and the porch being a site of surveillance over the land, and over the people as property. When we began the conversation around making the project in Venice, the conversations about the porch had to include that kind of tension somehow. It's assumed that the porch is welcoming for all, but historically speaking, it hasn't been. 

We wanted to speak from and for those voices that were challenging the porch as a site of belonging and a place where resistance was an act of just stepping out onto the porch. Just trying to be in public space and to normalize the condition of being part of the community instead of othering it. I think the porch has a very complicated history in America politically speaking, but I appreciate Marlon's interpretation and continuous execution of the porch as this handshake and welcome. It gets into that idea of porchness, don't you think, Marlon?

Marlon: Agreed. And in how that's manifested beyond the numbingly instrumental ways that porches are often used in society now as a formality, where they're not populated. It's like a pastiche. I think the way we were thinking about it is as a framework for life to happen, that encouraged interaction, that it wasn't a dead-end to something, but was the beginning.

To jump back to Venice, we were presented with a courtyard in the existing US Pavilion as well. So with the intervention of our porch, we made a “porchyard,” so to speak. We played up this idea of proscenium and how life can be expanded through a hybrid of a porch and a courtyard together.

Stephen: That's true. We should honor the landscape team Julie Bargmann and TEN x TEN. They were instrumental to this idea of the back porch. Marlon mentioned the proscenium, but what happens when you pass through the porch, and you're still not in the house? Could that become a kind of back porch in a sense?

Marlon: Do you remember that we wanted a back porch towards the small canal in the back, and they wouldn't allow that? Out of necessity then, Julie and the team said, "We'll make the courtyard the back porch."

If you're in the South, you rarely come through the front door. You come through the side door. There's a side porch a lot of times and that's how you know you're not a stranger. You go around.

I have to say I experienced all these different porches firsthand in my time as a bible salesman. There were a lot of porches without highly-manicured lawns or sidewalks. It's just dirt, and if it's raining, you dodge the mud, and maybe some stones, and you get up on that porch. Sometimes the porches are only 18 inches, two feet high. You sit on the edge of the porch, your feet in the dirt. If there are not enough rockers up there on that porch for everybody to sit on, you sit on the edge of the porch. That came across in this central area, right? The central area where everybody sat on the edge, your feet on the floor of rammed earth. It's like taking the porch and wrapping it around the center of the courtyard.

Stephen: A conversation pit.

Marlon: Yeah. There you go, that’s it. Julie and TEN x TEN really nailed the space.

Stephen: There's a couple things I want to pick up on there, Marlon. The distinction between the back porch and the front porch. Growing up in the city in Chicago, I had a back porch of sorts in this three story walk-up. The back porch would face the backyard and was where you could be yourself; you were amongst your family and friends. 

In Venice, the idea of a back porch became this conversation pit where the performances could happen; I think that's a really interesting distinction. So, you arrive and you go up onto the porch, and then you're welcomed in, and then by the time you get to the "back porch" or this conversation pit, that's where the porch is really coming to life.

Marlon: Yeah. Certainly for a group as a place to gather and linger. 

One of the other things Stephen did was to distribute these swings on the front porch so there could be something for an individual or two who might just want a sense of solitude while being on the porch. And then in the more collective part, you have a variety of ways in which you can sit, or be in that space. The way you distributed the furniture allowed for all of the porch to be used.

Solitude and fellowship are something we all need, but the beauty of solitude is it can also be felt within the presence of people. Life is both the individual and the collective, and how we interface on our terms in response to the situational. 

Stephen: Probably one of the most beautiful moments is when the light was streaming through the rafters and the banjo player from Arkansas was performing, and their child and other children were dancing in the center of the conversation pit. The perimeter was full. I looked back over my shoulder and there was someone in one of the swings just rocking gently and taking it all in. That's when it clicked for me. It was such a magical moment of architecture about people rather than about architecture. It was very powerful, and I think that's what set the pavilion apart in Venice.

Jessica: I like how you’ve described this notion of parallel play: "I'm doing my thing, you're doing your thing, but we're still together working on something."

Marlon: It's really key. I don't know if I told you, Stephen, but somebody relayed this to me. There were four German architects that came up on the porch, all dressed in black head to toe, standing there watching this happening happen. Eventually, one of them turned to the others and said, "This is joyous." That was it. [laughs]

Stephen: But he said it without joy. Right? [laughs]

Marlon: Well, that was his way of saying it, but I think he meant it.

Stephen: Yeah. There were definitely some moments where I saw Europeans transfixed, like they were watching an ethnography or something.

Marlon: Or like we had programmed this to happen exactly that way.

Stephen: Yeah. Some of them felt super comfortable. I got the impression that others just found it so naturally joyful that they didn't know how to react to it. Do you know what I mean?

Marlon: Yeah, like you're supposed to be vaguely dissatisfied while you're there. But instead you lose yourself in the moment.

Stephen: Having positive social relationships, parallel play, persists. I think that's all very necessary. I think the porch, for me, really spoke to the complexity of America. We're not monocultural. We're all individuals, we all have different points of view, but we can all gather and enjoy a song. We can all spend some time together and participate in the same moment.

Jessica: I would love to know what each of your core values are that you bring to a given project, and then I want to hear about what your process of collaborating was like on this particular commission.

Marlon: Our office came up with five values that we try to bring to every project:

One is “project before pride.” To be really transparent, responsible, and accountable. What we're doing is about the project rather than about us in particular. And then we also think about making it excellent before easy. If it's a worthy goal, usually you're going to have to sacrifice. It's hard. There's complexity to it, and you're after excellence rather than just choosing the more expedient thing to do.

We also try to have “curiosity before judgment,” and “clarity before haste.” To us, PORCH was architecture, and we wanted to clarify that. We didn't want to skip steps. We wanted to go through the protocols and methodologies with how it was constructed, who the officials were, the local codes and building methods, all of that. Clarity ensures that in the end, a project comes out the way in which you had imagined rather than as a death by a thousand cuts along the way because you rushed through it too quickly. 

The last value is “people before product.” So even though we have an idea of what we're thinking, we also know that we're part of a team. How can we pivot? How can we be inflected by what we're doing and hear other ideas, work with our partners, and try to develop really productive and meaningful relationships through the collaboration as a design team, and also with the people we're building it for? How do we achieve the project goals through working with people?

It's not always peaches and roses, but we work through it, and then we can say, "Let's go have a beer." Because we are all on a shared mission together, and I think that's really what the project becomes about, rather than just a product at the end.

Stephen: That's great. I'm thinking about the whiskey and cigars we had together. Good times. [laughs]

We always begin with, "Everyone is capable of design." In a way, that allows us to step outside of the center that we in the privileged occupy, and move to the periphery, and to look at, in many cases for our practice, how the rest of the world is engaging in design. That may lead us to Senegal, for example, or that might lead us to Boykin, Alabama, to work with the Gee's Bend Quilters. That as a starting point is really important to us.

We’re also always interested in innovation, but what does that look like? For us, it's not necessarily a technological innovation. It can be industrial, but more often than not that innovation comes through engaging the community that we're working with, and creating this kind of hybrid context where if I take the example of the Gee's Bend Quilters, we're bringing the fabric from Italy to the rural South, and they’re quilting with it in a way that they've never done before. That also creates the platform for us to be there in Venice and be so proud of that work. We weren't necessarily designers with a capital D in that scenario. My name doesn't appear on those quilts as a designer, but more as a collaborator, as an organizer.

We believe that the designer is a conduit through which ideas flow. In that case, we were connecting with this historic Black community of artists that's been making masterful work for generations but has never been shown at the Venice Biennale before. We were super proud to make that happen, and that summarizes our ethos and approach. What we're interested in bringing to the world of design has to be bigger than us for sure.

Jessica: As we close out, I'm curious what you hope visitors will take away from PORCH?

Marlon: Coming away with a sense of what a porch can be, and the fact that it is something that is deeply about the living. That architecture is in the living. Somebody was joking, but I took them seriously when they said that when you walk around a lot of the biennale, it feels almost like a science fair, an architecture biennale without architecture. I hope the porch offers a celebratory counterpart. 

Stephen: It’s a lot of data.

Marlon: At seventeen seconds per sentence, they figured out that if one person read everything in the Arsenale and the Giardini, it would take them two years to read. So, it's a little text-heavy. [laughs]

We went the other way. I think the biggest takeaway from PORCH is that it doesn't need to be esoteric or overly scientific. It needs to be understood as a work of architecture, but it also needs to be felt. And that's just as powerful.

Stephen: We'd love for people to take away the notion that design and architecture are always intertwined, that the scale of the hands, the scale of the body, the scale of the interior impacts the architecture just as much as the building itself. Design and architecture have to work hand in hand, and we don't have to maintain this top-down hierarchy. We hope it feels like an all-inclusive experience of the porch from the level of craft up to the level of the rafters. 

Marlon: I hope people will say, "I had a really memorable experience on PORCH." There really aren't many places in the Giardini or Arsenale where you can actually stop, take a breath, take things in, enjoy the shade and commune with other folks. PORCH provides that, but it also is quite serious as a typology that is a manifestation of who we are as a people, generous and kind.