PORCH

roofed structure, usually open at the sides, projecting from the face of a building and used to protect the entrance. It is also known in the United States as a veranda and is sometimes referred to as a portico. A loggia (q.v.) may also serve as a porch. There are few extant remains of the porch before the period of classical antiquity, though Egyptian wall paintings seem to indicate its occasional use on houses. One of the most important Greek porches is that of the Tower of the Winds at Athens (100 BC), in which two columns of a simple Corinthian order carry a pediment. Roman houses sometimes had long colonnades facing the street, which served as porches, a type that carried over to the Early Christian basilicas and that was probably used as a formal entrance to the narthex, itself a porchlike structure, in buildings such as the Basilica of Old St. Peter's (Rome, AD 330). During the Romanesque period, the stately colonnaded church entrance was replaced with a simple projecting porch covering the western doors, as in S. Zeno Maggiore at Verona, Italy (12th century), in which the columns are carried on marble lions, a motif frequently seen in Lombardy. In France, especially in Burgundy, the porch developed into a vaulted structure of great height and importance, two or more bays long and sometimes as wide as the entire church. The porch of the abbey church at Vzelay (1132-40) is a large and particularly fine example of this type, which is sometimes called an antechurch. During the Gothic era, two main porch types were developed in English ecclesiastical buildings. The first was a small, gabled porch that projected from the north or south walls of the nave rather than from the west doors, which, in contrast to the west doors of the great French cathedrals, were often small and undistinguished. The other type of porch, which was called a galilee, was developed to such an extent that it almost became a separate building. Galilees in medieval churches may have been used as courts of law or as places in which corpses lay before interment, but they probably served chiefly as chapels for penitents before their admission to the body of the church. In Germany churches of the Flamboyant Gothic period were frequently decorated with western porches of the most fantastic richness, with a great use of cusping, tracery, and canopy work, as in the double-arched entrance of the Ulm cathedral (c. 1390) and the triangular porch of the cathedral at Regensburg, Switz. (1482-86). During the Renaissance, the porch was usually treated as a colonnaded portico. Simple porches of two or four columns were exceedingly common features of domestic architecture in England and the United States, dating from the late 18th century.