The Block, The Stoop

PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity
19th Venice Architecture Biennale 2025

Clients: U.S. Department of State, LaBienale di Venezia
Location: Harlem, NY / Venice, Italy
Year: May 2025 - Nov 2025
Team: Jerome Haferd, Gabriel Moyer-Perez, Violet Greenbergand Pedro Cruz Cruz
Size: Window display with two oral history interviews on a digital web platform

Harlem’s porch—its stoop—has long functioned as civic infrastructure: a layered geography shaped by Black and other diasporic migrations where stairs, benches, and even parked cars assemble a shared “public yard.” In this concentrated zone of everyday exchange, the stoop enables social life and quietly absorbs needs for neighbors too often made vulnerable by design and policy. The porch is, and remains, a living culture of care.

The Block, the Stoop is a site-specific installation and a living archival inquiry into that culture. Along a field of mesh strips, the work prints frames from two oral history interviews that anchor the piece in local memory. In the first, Pupa Alston Francis speaks from his stoop—a gathering place on Haferd’s nearby Harlem block—mapping the intimacies of porch life. In the second, recorded as a walking interview, Thomas “Tommy” Campbell traces the neighborhood’s social landscape—block to park—and situates the Sankofa project within a longer spatial legacy of gathering, memory, and mutual aid.

By staging these voices in the open air, The Block, the Stoop invites visitors to inhabit the stoop as social infrastructure: to read, listen, and linger. The installation honors Harlem’s porch culture while acknowledging how migration, policy, and development have reshaped the built environment over decades—keeping community stories present, embodied, and in public.

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