Buffalo is a city of porches, big front porches, many extending across the entire front face of a house with lavish detail. Porches can be found on virtually every Buffalo street giving a distinctive architectural flavor to the city.
The porch is a way to transition from public street to private interior. Porches also serve as shelter, extending a welcoming gesture to waiting visitors. Architecture has a language that we all understand on a subconscious level and porches, being part of the path of entry to buildings, are often used to communicate with this language. Buffalo’s porches come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and detail, each speaking to us through architecture with a wonderful sense of animation.
The most dramatic of these are the fantastically grand temple-like porches that adorn many of the city’s Victorians. These porches express power, wealth, and influence without ambiguity. They borrow from the ancient Greeks and Romans using colossal scaled columns of the classical orders: Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian among other derivations.
These temple porches become instant monumental landmarks. They announce the importance and wealth of the occupants. Walking up the steps to a colossal porch like this makes one feel small but can also give a sense of grandeur. You can feel the power that they convey. Though they are most commonly found decorating the fronts of mansions these porches are also often used to give dignity to grand apartment buildings so that even a renter could buy some architectural clout.
One anomaly with many of these monumental porches is that they were very rarely used. They were mostly for street-side show. Entry to Buffalo’s urban palaces for residents and guests alike was often through a side “carriage” entry. Perhaps this too was a subtle way of saying “the front entry is too good for you so come around to the side”. Buffalo is blessed with an unusually high number of these fantastical porches. They are of course common on Delaware avenue but, sprinkled through out the city can be can be found many more examples. Often they lend tremendous stature to otherwise modest houses.
There is a trend to bring back the colossal porch with numerous new housing developments now include housing models that sport towering columns. These newer versions, though often decidedly less successful aesthetically, pay homage to the grand old Buffalo residences that set the standard for elegant living.
For more porches go here http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showthread.php?t=30046
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