Creating Indoor and Outdoor Spaces for Health and Vitality
(Page 2 of 3)
May/June 2002
By Carol Venolia
Indigenous cultures can teach us a lot about the art of indoor/outdoor living. On this continent, the Pueblo people worked on their rooftops on sunny winter days; the adjacent adobe walls absorbed and then released solar heat and made the half-enclosed space more comfortable than the dark interior. In Central America, the semitropical climate gave rise to the palapa—a palm-frond roof supported by palm trunks, which acts as both umbrella and parasol while allowing free airflow. The traditional Thai house has a similar open pavilion made of teak known as a sala; characterized by a steeply pitched, curving roof, it has bamboo blinds that are lowered during the monsoon season.
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In Renaissance Italy, walled gardens were sunk into the earth. Protected from winter winds, the walls stored and reradiated solar heat to the garden’s occupants. In Persia, garden pavilions modified seasonal extremes: A large, roofed porch was oriented to provide shade in summer and catch the southern breeze; fountains upwind cooled the air even more. In winter, the low sun warmed the porch while a solid wall blocked the cold north winds. In this country, the front porch was the focus of warm-weather living before automobiles, television, and air-conditioning came along. Southern porches grew into two-story colonnades that shaded the south face of a grand house, caught breezes, allowed the windows to be left open in the rain, and aided interior ventilation. In poorer areas, the “dog-trot” house—in which two portions of a house were separated by a roofed passageway open on both ends—provided shade and breeze that brought summer living outdoors. In many parts of the pre-industrial United States, summer kitchens kept the heat of cooking out of living areas. And in the early 1900s, sleeping porches were popular, largely because of a belief that foul indoor air contributed to disease.
Feathering your nest
Planning an indoor/outdoor space can be enlivening in itself. This is an opportunity to relearn skills that were instinctive to our ancestors: watching the path of the sun, noticing the direction and force of the wind, observing seasonal precipitation, and taking note of landmarks, topography, flora, fauna, and water flow.
Look around your home for indoor/outdoor living opportunities. If you have enough space, you may choose more than one spot and develop each for different uses or climate conditions. You may want a solarium on the southeast side for winter breakfasts, a screened porch on the west side for sleeping and for shading the house in summer, and a vine-covered trellis on the north side, with a lazily dribbling fountain, for enjoying cool drinks on a hot summer day.