I’m a stoop dweller. No matter the season, this marginal space functions as a break between inside and outside, between familiar and unfamiliar, between recognized and anonymity, between private and public, between lost and found. Or perhaps it’s just a place to watch from.
Josh Owen moves the essence of the stoop off of the typical urban grid, so the stoop can be translated to a park or a district without places to sit:
Like a bench, the stoop is a marginal space. There is no way to know whether its occupants are coming or going. And in fact this does not matter. The stoop is a liminal site — it is a place which is as much about transition as it is about pause. I wondered if it would be possible to capture the essence of that indigenous behavior, so entwined with its site-specific nature, in order to have more flexibility to invite similar social behavior in other contexts than the entry to the home, on a block of homes on the grid.
Designed for DesignPhiladelphia 2009.
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