Veranda

The veranda can be found across a range of geographies and time periods. It is an exterior, semi-open building element constructed as an extension to or as a separate object attached to a more substantial structure. Found in domestic and public buildings, it can encircle a building or occupy part of its facade. Several other terms have been used to describe the same or similar building elements, including porch, portico, piazza, and gallery. This range of terminology corresponds to a range of hypotheses about the origins of the veranda.

Veranda first occurs in a record of Vasco da Gama's 1498 trip to India. From this and other sources, it is clear that the word was used in fifteenth-century architecture in Portugal. Portuguese speakers in India may have applied veranda to an Indian building element that seemed familiar. Indians used similar words that originated in Sanskrit and Persian. British administrators appropriated the form as they developed the bungalow into a specialized residence for Europeans in the tropics. Verandas offered an ideal site for the enactment of power and for activities that enabled social exclusion on racial and cultural grounds. The term, first documented in England in 1800 and Australia in 1805, was diffused as Europeans moved around the world to further their interests.

Drawing on histories of migration, Jay Edwards has summarized the main theories of origin for the veranda. Before the fifteenth century, buildings raised on plinths, with open sides supported on posts, were common in West Africa. Similar forms were found in areas of central and southern Africa. In eastern Africa, the Swahili baraza served comparable functions.

Locals used these veranda-like spaces for socializing, sleeping, and working. Slaves took this form to the New World, where it was firmly established by the seventeenth century.

Sixteenth-century Italian villas included open loggias and pedimented porticos, borrowed from classical antiquity. In contrast to West African verandas, loggias and porticos served primarily representational purposes. They became popular throughout Europe and may have influenced the emergence of verandas in the colonies. Similarly, projecting roofs and galleries occurred in Portugal [Page 956]and Normandy, from where they reached the Americas, offering ready references for existing forms. With the processes of exchange characteristic of cultural contact zones, new veranda forms found their way back to Africa, South Asia, and Europe.

The current influence of the veranda is perhaps most discernible in the southern United States where the porch still exerts a strong influence on the cultural imagination and built environment. Its significance in everyday life engages questions of race, gender, and class because of its unique physical and psychological liminality.