Viewing, Watching, Observing: Aging and the Architecture of Intermediate Space
The coronavirus is quickly decimating America’s nursing home population: roughly a third of all COVID-19 deaths in the country have occurred within senior care settings. The friends and relatives of residents are barred from visiting, raising thorny questions for a sector that has always struggled with transparency: what is really happening within, behind closed doors? And for residents (now more disconnected than ever), what is happening outside? Photographs of today’s nursing home crisis reveal how separated families have attempted to navigate these interrelated challenges by activating the architectural membrane of these buildings in heart-wrenching but innovative ways—touching hands across a window pane, holding up signs, singing birthday songs loud enough to be heard by those within. Visual permeability, in particular, has become a lifeline for vulnerable elders and a reassurance to their loved ones.
While in certain respects novel as the coronavirus is, the acts of viewing, watching, and observing have been critical aspects of sheltered care settings since the advent of the “home for the aged” in the nineteenth century. Initially incidental to the programmatic intent of the designers and administrators of such institutions, these visual activities have long been critical to the spatial practice of institutionalizing elders. I realized this first-hand after visiting nearly ten historic senior care facilities—all built before 1935—last year as part of my dissertation research on the architectural history of congregate senior care. Just about all featured a processional courtyard, a porte cochere entryway, and a cluster of residents seated on benches, in rockers, or in their own wheel chairs enjoying the sun and fresh air but also clearly positioned to observe the outside, and the comings and goings of visitors (figure 1). Smiling, waving, unsolicited hellos: these became routine aspects of my fieldwork. Once inside complexes, I found more of the same: people sitting in lobbies, circulatory hallways, and an array of porches and verandas. In a pre-COVID world, the kinetic comings-and-goings of visitors, staff, UPS drivers, and fellow residents offered both spectacle and the opportunity for unplanned mingling. Particularly for homebound and non-ambulatory older adults, occupying the intermediate terrain of indoor/outdoor areas, of circulatory zones, or even generous picture windows, provided a crucial activity for residents unable to physically engage the outside world.
Figure 1. The front processional entrance to Norwood Crossing, formerly the Norwegian Old People’s Home, Chicago. Note the sitting area and pergola adjacent to the front door. Photograph courtesy of Google, August 2011 Street View image.
This led me to wonder, is there historic evidence of viewing, watching, and observing as a critical component of nursing home life? Though commentary on the lived experience of seniors in the earliest old age homes is limited, even a brief visual survey of such buildings reveals the prevalence of porches, sometimes lining the perimeter wall of structures, sometimes even facing inward, toward courtyards, emphasizing not just the importance of looking outside, but looking, period. Not only did these verandas suggest the trappings of middle-class gentility, or offer the salubriousness of fresh air, as was common among grand Victorian resort buildings, but they also served as a platform for residents to watch the world, including one another, go by (figure 2) [1]. Photographs from the early twentieth century evince how seniors congregated on porches to partake in communal watching; newspapers suggest the important role of these spaces within the lived environment of the home, including as a place for fundraising events and other social gatherings for the wider community (figure 3).
Figure 2. Postcard of the front porch of the Presbyterian Home for Widows and Single Women, Philadelphia, ca. 1943. Note the rocking chairs. © The Library Company of Philadelphia.
Figure 3. Residents congregate on the front stoop of the Presser Home for Retired Music Teachers, Philadelphia, N.D. Photograph courtesy of the Presser Foundation.
Typical was Philadelphia’s Methodist Episcopal Home, dedicated in 1899, which featured at least five porches for residents to occupy, one facing the street and four facing the home’s entry courtyard. This court was the hub of lively foot traffic, with volunteer groups, church leaders, and visiting friends coming and going (figure 4) [2]. Its porches were so beloved that the Home’s leaders found strategies to glass the spaces in winter, thereby creating seasonal sun parlors [3].
Figure 4. Postcard of the Methodist Episcopal Home for the Aged of Philadelphia, including one of its porches, ca. 1905. © The Library Company of Philadelphia.
Though the importance of this type of threshold space did not appear to have been anticipated by designers and staff, emerging experts in the field of elder housing soon took note. By the mid-twentieth century the first architectural and sociological writings on senior care design began to describe the significance of facilitating the “pastime” of watching, including through purposeful design. Frances M. Carp, as part of a 1960s-era longitudinal study of the Victoria Plaza senior apartment complex in San Antonio, Texas, described how “back porches were much appreciated as a place of one’s own to sit in the shade (or sun) and watch what went on,” while the entryway, featuring a “gauntlet of ‘lobby sitters,’” was where residents liked to “just sit and watch what went on” (figure 5) [4].
Figure 5. Victoria Plaza, San Antonio, the first public housing facility in the United States designed to accommodate low-income older adults, 1960. Photograph courtesy of Google, April 2011 Street View image.
One of the earliest instructional pamphlets cataloguing how to achieve optimal senior home design, Planning Homes for the Aged, published in 1959, encouraged architects to orient “key rooms” toward the outside, whether the spectacle was picturesque or otherwise. Even the mundane would do: “These views need not be scenic; older people enjoy watching activities, such as children at play in a school yard, or traffic on a busy street.” [5] A 1961 Architectural Forum article by William C. Loring entitled “Design for a New Housing Market: The Old,” suggested that, “In terms of casual contacts the sitting area located just off the main walk within sight of the street entrance to the development can generate much use by residents, half of whom will be en route elsewhere.” In their 1963 manual Buildings for the Elderly, architect Noverre Musson and gerontologist Helen Heusinkveld encouraged designers to consider “seating at street [level] for watching the passing show.” “Even visual stimulus promotes activity of the mind,” they continued, so that “a view of movement on a river or highway will prove a source of entertainment to those whose mobility is limited.” Musson and Heusinkveld provided examples such as a home with a balcony overlooking a ballpark and a Kentucky facility that featured “a porch from which residents can watch the races with binoculars!”[6]
“Even in old age . . . there is joy, companionship, and spontaneity which . . . is facilitated by the material context—the places and porches—that allow the elderly to touch the world beyond.”
Similar to designer’s manuals, the literature produced by homes for the aged framed looking and observing as important pastimes. As Philadelphia’s Uptown Ladies Home noted in 1958, “a bright cheerful side porch is one of the Home’s attractions which draws its Guests [sic] away from their rooms—and away from solitude and despondency.”[7] We now understand that keeping seniors socially engaged is critical for their mental and physical health; in this instance, the porch induces seniors out of isolation. The 1961 Annual Report for the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews in Harlem labels a photograph of a woman staring out of a window as “A Room with a View.” Convalescing in the infirmary wing, this resident, in an extended caption, relayed the joys it afforded her: “I looked toward the upper stories of some apartment houses on 106th Street and had ample opportunity to speculate about the occupants” including the “boys jumping from roof to roof.” Extending her gaze to the skyline, her mind drifted to the “golden apartment lights in distant tall buildings.” “When I was privileged to sit in a chair by the window,” she explained, “I had the pleasure of seeing the great tree outside the lower floor offices.” “Being made well again can be pleasant,” she concluded, through the act of watching.[8] Life seen beyond the home, in short, becomes a kind of therapy, and the window a critical conduit.
Seniors seated in transition space is a common theme in photographic documentation of homes for the aged in this era, and beyond: seniors on porches, in gardens, near windows, in solaria. In fact, the cover of that very same Annual Report of the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews depicts five women residents seated on a bench set flush against the brick façade of the building (figure 6). They watch the street ballet, to invoke Jane Jacobs, which in this instance is an older gentleman flirtatiously tipping his hat (to which the smiling women, looking delighted, respond in kind). Even in old age, the image suggests, there is joy, companionship, and spontaneity which, I would add, is facilitated by the material context—the places and porches—that allow the elderly to touch the world beyond.
Figure 6. Cover of the Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews’, Ninetieth Annual Report, 1960-1961. © The American Jewish Historical Society.
While architects and care providers were coming to terms with the importance of thresholds for looking, the coupling of institutions for older adults with “porch life” became a kind of cultural trope. Mark Strand titled a 1964 poem “Old People on the Nursing Home Porch.” In it, the porch is depicted as a transition space between communion and solitude, between life and death, waiting until the darkness comes and, “The need to go indoors/ Where each will lie alone/ in the deep and sheepless/ pastures of a long sleep.” In this poem, it appears that the porch is deployed for its connotations of restfulness, passiveness, of a well-deserved “R & R” for a long life.
Paradoxically, the architectural and social evidence suggests just the opposite: that these transition spaces represent an active and purposeful attempt to find material vantages for engaging others and the outside world. A 1973 television short on aging, produced by NBC-TV in partnership with the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (the precursor of the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services), was tellingly titled “Front Porch.” Today, a non-profit of the same name is one of Southern California’s largest providers of senior housing. All this is to say that the conflation of seniors with a distinct architectural space, the porch, has stuck.
The manner by which institutionalized seniors have come to co-opt transitional space for the purpose of viewing and socializing illustrates what environmental gerontologists have called the “centralization of activity” for disabled elders. It is a tactic by seniors to combat the increasingly restrictive geographic circumference of movement and social contact that accompanies old age, perhaps especially in institutional settings; an adaptation to the reality of an aging body. This is not to say that nursing homes lack sociability, programming, and recreational activity for seniors—in fact, quite the opposite. But by occupying and surveying the liminal area of porches, lobbies, and hallways, older adults get to engage not only the intergenerational “outside,” but a key aspect of non-institutionalized life—what Jacobs called the “exuberant diversity” of cities.
Could designers today capitalize on this phenomenon when conceiving of future “architectures of aging?” Or do the acts of viewing, watching, and observing indicate a deeper imperative, one much greater than architectural solutions alone: the longing for a social porosity, one that permeates the four walls of the nursing home? In the wake of COVID-19, nursing homes and senior care facilities will face a reckoning. Built environment professionals and administrators have already assumed the important task of brainstorming architectural strategies for minimizing future outbreaks among nursing home residents. As they do so, it is imperative that the social needs of institutionalized seniors are accounted for, both in physical form and in programmatic strategy. The spatial tactics of institutionalized seniors, apparent in the historical record and today, are merely a by-product of a greater need for social contact, activity, and multi-generational connectivity.
NOTES
[1] See: Betsy Blackmar and Elizabeth Cromley, “On the Verandah: Resorts of the Catskills,” in Victorian Resorts and Hotels: Essays from a Victorian Society Symposium, Richard Guy Wilson, ed. Nineteenth Century 8, no. 1-2 (1982): 51-57.
[2] “The wings have porches at the first and second story, overlooking the hollow square or court. There are additional open porches on the rear at first story.” See: “New Home for the Aged Methodists,” The North American (November 3, 1899), 9.
[3] “Methodist Home for the Aged to Be Dedicated Next Week,” The North American (September 28, 1899), 12.
[4] Frances M. Carp, “Housing Older Persons: The Victoria Plaza Experience,” in Victoria Plaza Revisited: Lessons for the Evaluation of Housing for the Elderly, Arza Churchman, ed. (Milwaukee: Center for Architecture and Urban Planning Research, 1994), 36.
[5] Geneva Mathiasen and Edward H. Noakes, ed. Planning Homes for the Aged (New York: F. W. Dodge Corporation, 1959), 18.
[6] Noverre Musson and Helen Heusinkveld, Buildings for the Elderly (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1963), 43; 44.
[7] Upton Ladies Home, 45th Anniversary Program (1958), from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, HV 1471. P52 U7X, 33.
[8] The Home for Aged and Infirm Hebrews, Ninetieth Annual Report (1960-1961), American Jewish Historical Society, Call Number I-308, Box 3, Folder 5, np.
