The Veranda as Metaphor

On May 28, 1498, following an audience with the king of Calicut, Samoothiri Maharajas, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama was caught in a violent storm which forced his party to seek shelter in the house of his Moor guide. This is the earliest mention in literature of a veranda:

By that time four hours of the night had already gone … The Moor then took him [Vasco da Gama] to his own house and we were admitted to a court within it, where there was a veranda [em huma varanda] roofed in with tiles. Many carpets had been spread and there were two large candlesticks like those in the royal palace.

It has special significance in understanding the confused origins of the veranda. Da Gama’s journal is especially helpful. The veranda he describes in Calicut, on India’s south-western Malabar Coast, has many carpets and, since the time was around ten in the evening, was generously lit by two large candlesticks. We can infer it was a generous commodious space used by the Arab household and, on occasion, to handle casual visitors such as the da Gama party.

Arab merchants traded with Calicut, “city of spices”, as early as the seventh century. Calicut was famed for calico, a fine variety of hand-woven cotton. Some ideas of the size of the Arab presence in the city can be gauged from the twenty to thirty mosques there at the time. Da Gama’s description suggests the veranda consisted of a small recessed veranda or alcove off the inner courtyard, connected to the street by an entry vestibule. The layout of the Moor’s house replicates that of a much more ancient form from Baghdad. This is not surprising: Islamic architecture took its models from diverse sources including Mesopotamia.

The Portuguese word varanda simply meant to surround with “vara” or rods. Exactly what the rods were is uncertain. It could refer to veranda posts that supported a tile roof in this instance, or to rods that form the latticed screens prevalent in many Middle Eastern houses. The veranda spelling is to be preferred to the clumsy English verandah spelling since it connects, rather than obscures, the Iberian origin and meaning. The function of the veranda in the Baghdad courtyard house, and its later Arab derivative, was to isolate uninvited male guests from the women folk occupying the inner rooms. In that sense it was a specialised place for uninvited guests or visitors.

If etymology is a guide, the veranda originated in Portugal and was borrowed from the Middle East via North Africa. In most cultures, certainly where climate poses a challenge, a mediation device is engaged in the architecture to make a transition between the private and public realms. You might even go so far as to describe it as an intermediate decompression zone. Each culture has a word for its architectural means of achieving such separation. Hence, tracking down the actual source of the veranda is fraught, as there are so many shades of veranda around the world. Whether it came from Portugal, Spain or Persia, or from an Arab Islamic source, it is apparent that the form transmitted in the nineteenth century was connected to the colonial bungalow. This did not prevent its wider adoption on government buildings, courthouses, shops fronting main thoroughfares, pubs, hospitals, wherever climate necessitated some kind of protection from the sun or rain or both. In the tropics, where a midday sun could be to the south or the north, verandas were needed on multiple sides.

Clearly the veranda was not solely of Anglo-Indian derivation, but instead was brought to India well before the fifteenth century by Arab traders. The Portuguese established a fort in 1511, and the English landed in 1615, followed by the French in 1698 and the Dutch in 1752. The Hobson-Jobson Anglo-Indian Dictionary (1886), gives veranda a possible Arabic origin, meaning “a lattice, or anything latticed, such as a window,—a balcony, a balustrade”. This would appear to indicate a space typically with mushrabiya openings.

It has been argued that the ancient peristyle on ancient Greek temples predates the veranda. This ignores a fundamental difference between the two: a veranda is essentially a lightweight construction or fore-structure shading and cooling the interior of a dwelling, while the monumental peristyle of a Greek temple has a largely symbolic and architectonic function. The peristyle screen of heavy fluted columns around the outside of a temple demarcating the sacred from the profane is largely symbolic, whereas the veranda is a practical device. The peristyle symbolised the sacred wood—the columns represent tree trunks. The veranda has little in common with this, and by contrast, evokes a culturally remote, exotic Arab source based on climatic as well as social factors—in order to remove and shield women from the world of men outside.

The European colonial dwelling deliberately set itself apart from the surrounding native population, once the chief objective of trade changed to that of governing. After the East India Company was absorbed by the British government in 1813, the distance between the British and Indians widened, the change in attitude being reflected in manners, dress and lifestyle, as well as in architecture. The veranda is a symptom of the greater isolation between the British and the governed.

What typically distinguishes a veranda from a porch is its extent: the veranda can run around many sides of a dwelling, whereas a porch gives shelter over the principal entrance. In the northern hemisphere the porch is more often on the south side. In Anglo-Indian bungalows, the veranda commonly surrounds the house on at least three sides, since the sun in the tropics can be on any side of the house depending on the time of day and the time of year. The veranda allows inhabitants to move from one side to another according to the conditions, whether to seek shelter from tropical monsoons, or exposure to cooling breezes from the sea or from nearby mountains.

The veranda’s occurrence suggests a European currency arising from colonialism, given its wide distribution in the Dutch East Indies, French and British India, the West Indies and South Africa before Australia, New Zealand and South America. In Hollywood westerns of the 1950s, gunfighters face off in streets lined by verandas. Americans use words such as piazza, porch, gallery and stoop, each with its distinct regional bias. With some justification Americans can claim the veranda as their own creation—indeed, a current women’s decorator magazine goes by the title Veranda. The chief difference in the veranda between Australia and America is its diversity in America, with its Spanish, French, Dutch and English background, whereas in Australia it is singularly English via India, though American influence creeps in later in the nineteenth century.

The veranda was present, if not at the beginning of settlement in Australia in 1788, then soon afterwards in 1792, when it supplied a welcome shaded platform to espy ships entering Port Jackson with supplies and merchandise, including rum, the unofficial currency of the day.

The first houses around Sydney Cove were crude structures with small windows and pitched roofs that failed miserably to deal with climate, being little better than ovens that cooked their inhabitants. Verandas were welcome additions that protected walls from drenching rain and shaded them, keeping the interior cooler through the day. Furthermore, a veranda helped to alleviate the cramped interior by offering an alternative, it connected people to their surroundings, and served as a place from which to look out for approaching villains or visitors.

The environmental advantages of a veranda are significant. Unlike London, Sydney was hot. Air-conditioning in Australia did not arrive until after the end of the Second World War. The American company Carrier, which had supplied the US military with air-conditioning units during the Pacific conflict, expanded its operations. For more than a century and a half, Australians had relied on the veranda as a passive form of air-conditioning which, helped by an adjacent garden, served as a shaded outdoor living room as well as a means of cooling. Trellis screens, climbing plants and the garden all assisted in enhancing this environmental operation. During the 1950s it would be challenged by air-conditioning and the motor car. Before this, the veranda also provided convenient hitching posts for horses.

Modern architecture, along with the growing presence of motor cars in towns during the 1930s, posed a direct threat to the veranda. Modern architecture had no use for it, and cars smashed the post supports. The veranda fell out of favour. To Harry Seidler verandas represented a backward step from the perfect machine image exemplified by Le Corbusier. At first he was criticised for his large unprotected glass fenestration facing into the sun but the new look soon took hold regardless. The Australian-born Sydney Ancher incorporated the veranda into Modern architecture; Seidler never accepted it. As he saw it, the veranda was part of a backward colonial legacy from the British Empire. Much later on, Seidler, at least in his office towers, did adopt a more sensible approach by installing sun shields, but even then he was taking a hint from Le Corbusier.

Although Seidler rejected Australian vernacular practice, Glenn Murcutt appreciated how sensible and practical many of its innovations were in resolving local climatic factors whilst, at the same time, not turning his back on Modern simplicity and explicit expression of function. Over  time traditional vernacular building solutions had emerged—such as glass louvres, corrugated iron, and wind-driven turbines to extract hot air from roofs—that gained popularity because they solved the challenges thrown up by climate. Murcutt’s most profound inspiration, one rarely recognised as such, was to transform the veranda into a long narrow dwelling. In effect, Murcutt elevated the veranda from its secondary role in the nineteenth-century as a passive version of air-conditioning, and made it the complete dwelling.

Possibly it was his childhood in colonial New Guinea: the impact of the tropics was so powerful it brought home the role of the veranda as a climate modifier and connector to landscape. Put simply, Murcutt straightened the veranda out, detached it from the nineteenth-century bungalow and discarded the house behind it. The result was something as unfamiliar as it was revolutionary—a long house, sometimes more than thirty metres long that was shallow, often not much deeper than five metres. It had a solid back wall, a survival from the facade of the bungalow, and an open front to capture breezes. In effect, it was a shallow dwelling resembling an extended veranda, which exposed its residents to the landscape and to vistas of distant scenery. It placed its owners in the landscape instead of isolating them from it. The veranda house locked them in an embrace with landscape. If you recall the etymology of veranda, that is precisely what it meant. The veranda is the architectural element that keeps us safe and protected as it brings nature forward for our contemplation.

The idea was not new. Murcutt was frequently criticised during the 1980s, if surreptitiously imitated, for designing houses more suited to the Australian bush, and not producing urban houses. While his critics did have a point, they failed to see the excellent houses which he did design, not only in Sydney. A long thin dwelling such as his veranda house was eminently suited to the narrow city plots filled by the climatically unsuitable terrace houses that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the predominant dwelling type in the inner city. Murcutt had only to refer his critics to the Charleston house to make his point.

West Indian influence may account for the typical Charleston house plan: end to street; rooms strung out in a line, one room deep so as to afford cross-ventilation; piazzas shading the long side, generally to the south or west, and overlooking a small enclosed garden. One could easily be describing a Murcutt house of the 1980s instead of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century America. The big difference is obvious—the materials, corrugated iron substituting for clapboard walls.

Benjamin Simons’s Charleston house of 1699 consisted of a single line of rooms, permitting cross-ventilation, with shading piazzas on each side. Each dwelling was separated by a garden and had the advantage of a short front that reduced the street frontage. The pattern is readily applicable in Australian cities today. It would also alleviate the obvious defects of the terrace house with its inadequate daylight and ventilation, not to mention its notorious smell of rising damp. All that is needed is reorientation to the northern sun so the house is aligned to the north-east.

Australians cannot claim to own the veranda; it resulted from European expansion into the tropics, which was a multi-national colonial enterprise motivated by trade and the quest for riches. To that extent, it is truly international and a by-product of nineteenth-century colonialism. The way it manifested itself and infiltrated so many aspects of life and culture in Australia is unique. Nowhere else did it reach so deeply, or inflect cultural expression so profoundly as to become a metaphor for the entire nation, whether the reference is to literature, theatre, or the visual arts during the 1950s. Mention of the veranda will induce an involuntary smile, such is its trance-like effect on people as they relive the innocent pleasure of being absorbed by nature.

The earth is warming. The climate across Australia will be hotter, there will be increased demand on power generation to meet higher air-conditioning loads in summer, and a greater bushfire threat to settlements. Australian architects will of necessity have to rethink the design of buildings, and the planning of cities. To meet the challenge we may find it worthwhile to reconsider the role of the veranda as a skirt that shelters walls and keeps them cool, while removing rain from buildings. We need to be open to lessons from the past.

More than thirty years ago, Glenn Murcutt demonstrated how versatile and effective lightly-constructed verandas were in coping with solar radiation. As Australia heats up such measures will become increasingly important. Australian architects should heed what the veranda can teach us and suggest innovative new variations.

Reacting to heritage protesters opposed to the demolition of the historic Bellevue Hotel in Brisbane, Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen ordered the wreckers to destroy its glorious verandas. Bjelke-Petersen knew full well that with its veranda skirt stripped off and reduced to an uninteresting British shell, the Bellevue Hotel was no longer worth saving. Deprived of its verandas, the magic was gone.

Verandas have a mysterious power: even crooked broken ones with bits missing exude a nostalgic magic that takes us back to an older, slower Australia. In the past children did their lessons there, mothers hung out the washing, fathers spent their evenings smoking there and retired to the sleep-out. The veranda was a place where old friends chatted, where new friends were greeted, where the sunburnt swagman rested along the endless wallaby track, and the itinerant tradesperson stood and inquired about work. The veranda has lost many of its associations, but even so, it retains a potency as a repository of historical memory. In a much larger sense, it also suggests the geographical construction of Australia, of a littoral culture existing on the extreme coastal edge of the continent.

In the nineteenth century it was the inland that beckoned. The centre of this vast inland was Uluru. It was there that an ancient older Australian identity was posited. If we are truly honest, that is no longer true any more. Much as colonial society moved out of the hot box that was the English house onto the veranda seeking a more relaxed and comfortable lifestyle, today, most Australians live within ten kilometres of the ocean on the extreme rim of the country—what I have termed the geographical veranda, looking out to the world beyond.

Embedded in the veranda is a lesson from the past. It suggests how we relate our private inner lives to the external world surrounding us. In the nineteenth century, settlers gazed out at the landscape framed picturesquely between veranda posts; these days people are more likely to receive the world outside via an internet connection as fragmented, transient and absurdly virtual. Humankind’s future is threatened by surging population growth that will add further billions to the planet.

How architects respond to climate change and population growth, whether grounded in common sense or with irrelevant sculptural excesses, will be critical. Verandas, whatever their shade, were cultural as well as climatic. From the outset in Australia, the veranda embraced what lay beyond the dwelling. For convict and emancipist, for officer and governor, it supplied a sheltered platform from which to gaze seaward for arriving vessels bearing news from the old world. Americans may lay claim to the veranda as a part of their national inheritance, certainly with respect to cinema, but only in Australia can it be said that the veranda encapsulates the very culture. Australians by nature are expansive, open in many ways compared to Europeans. It could be geography. It is also suggestive of the veranda from where we embrace the landscape.

We have inherited a veranda culture and, up to a point, we are a veranda people. By this I would suggest, we came to Australia uninvited, and we have developed a littoral civilisation on the extreme edge of the country’s continental veranda. The beach, not Uluru, is the truest symbol of the nation. The veranda says that. Only when we embrace Australia as a totality will we be fully connected fully with it.