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 may also serve as a porch.
There is little material evidence of the existence of the porch before the period of Classical antiquity, although Egyptian wall paintings seem to indicate that porches were occasionally used 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 that served as porches facing the street. This type carried over to the Early Christian basilicas and 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 the 12th-century San Zeno Maggiore at Verona, Italy, 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 Vézelay (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, 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 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, Switzerland (1482–86).
During the Renaissance, porches were typically colonnaded porticos. 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.