Are We Designing Ourselves Into Isolation?

There’s an architectural design that almost guarantees protection from outside threats. The building itself is massive and far from the street. The outside fence is really a massive barrier, high enough to keep out invaders or even curious onlookers. The inside walls are thick and impenetrable, and any common spaces inside are restricted to residents only, thwarting any new relationship, or even interaction, with outsiders. There’s surveillance, human and technological.

The building, of course, is a prison, and it’s not a place where most of us live, or that any of us lives voluntarily. And yet, by literal and figurative design, we have created our own prisons. Eleven million Americans live in gated communities, with demand growing. The welcoming classic, the white picket fence, is becoming a nostalgic throwback, with homeowners installing aluminum and steel individual property gates. Front door cameras are increasingly popular, sparing residents from interacting with someone they haven’t met before. Porches, encouragingly, are on the increase in new home construction, after a steep decline in the mid-20th century. But when was the last time you walked a neighborhood with people out on their porches – playing music, having a cold drink, and inviting neighbors up for a chat?

Design reflects our world – our culture, our evolving tastes and also our fears. Design can also exploit fears, or at least feed the often irrational demands of the fearful. There’s the intimidation factor of the bigger house: in 1950, the average size of a single-family home was 983 square feet. By 2025, the average size of a new single family home had grown to a formidable 2,386 square feet. More homes are guarded by community or individual gates.

The Brutalist design for buildings, once associated with commercial structures, is now gaining popularity for residential properties, turning homes into fortresses with function-over-decor design. Those can can afford it are choosing inward-facing home design, with the rooms of the structure built around a private courtyard or patio — meaning, a space inaccessible and out of the view of strangers.

Conventional wisdom is that home design changes as our world changes, and that, suchashame , the world is vastly more dangerous than it was in the days when someone would actually walk out on a front porch to wave at a neighbor, or —shocker! —actually answer the door without knowing who was on the other side. Except that we’re not less safe, statistically. After a sharp rise during the 1960s and 1970s, the rate of violent crime has made an historic drop since the early 1990s. Robberies and larceny are way down as well. New York City, which bears the brunt of the anti-city sentiment in this country, boasted the fewest number of murders in recorded history during the first four months of this year.

But people are still afraid, often irrationally so, and it’s interfering with the idea of community – paradoxically making us less safe, since we don’t have as many people looking out for us. I experienced this recently when a new family moved into our cul-de-sac. Wanting to welcome them, I showed up at their porchless home with a plate of homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I was met with some suspicion (was it a trick? Was I really carrying an explosive device? Were the cookies laced with fentanyl?) and cautious, eventual acceptance of the sweets, retrieved through a door never fully opened. Only the dog seemed excited to make a new friend (of course, I had food).

Is design making us isolate ourselves? Or is it just answering a demand from a fearful or inward-looking public?

Designer and architect Christopher Gorney notes the observation by British statesman Winston Churchill: “We shape our buildings. Therefore they shape us” – a quote later tweaked by urban planner Jan Gehl, who noted, “First we shape the cities. Then they shape us.”

“You can’t really design community into a space. You can certainly use design to prohibit community,” said Gorney, who has studied subconscious design controls and safety. But design can still be a community enabler, he said.

You can’t really design community into a space. You can certainly use design to prohibit community.”

Christopher Gorney

“In my experience, design is a tool that when done well, can position people to make social connections. It can put people in the right place, doing the right thing, with the right attitude. It can make conditions favorable for people to make a connection,” he said. And that’s why community gets lost when porch culture wanes.

The veranda was really a form of social technology. Now we see it as nostalgia.”

Christopher Gorney

Technology is, in fact, at the root of the decline of porch culture. While verandas were essential to provide a shaded, breezy refuge during hot days, air conditioning changed all that, noted Philip J. Consalvo, a principal at PJC Architecture. Later on, TV (and now, other screens) made the inside of the house more entertaining. Since then, privacy and security are concerns.

“You live in a neighborhood, and you love that neighborhood, but what is your role on connecting to the people who are living right next door?” Consalvo said. “For most people, it’s about how you are living inside your own house, not necessarily how you are connecting outside.”

The value of porches and verandas, he said, is that they offer a kind of “neutral space,” where residents can interact with neighbors. It’s kind of private, but it’s not private. It forces you to kind of interact but not in an official, polished way. It creates an interesting space that otherwise might not exist,” he said.

You can’t make people reach out to neighbors and strangers. But designers and architects can make it easier for people to engage, creating a third space that offers a bit if security with opportunity.

Imagine sitting under a tree on a hill, your back up against the tree trunk, observes Erin Peavey, an architect who strives to design spaces that counter loneliness and foster resilience. You’re outside, and open to interacting with the world around you — but you also have the reassurance of the powerful tree trunk supporting your back. Porches and verandas are like that, she said, metaphorically having your back while exposing you to the outside world.

“When I think of how we design for connection,” it’s not about throwing people together and making them connect, Peavey said. It’s “the idea of being exposed to one another in a way that feels safe for multiple people. One of the amazing things that verandas or porches are able to do is this in-between space, This in between space is really where you really start to get that choice. Where they’re invited, not forced, to be able to interact.”

And it’s that interaction, that community, that really makes us safer. In her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” Jane Jacobs discusses the concept of “eyes on the street,” people naturally creating community security by observing what was happening in their neighborhood.

William A. Morgan / Shutterstock.com That works if people are in shared public spaces, or watching from their front porches or stoops. It doesn’t happen when people are self-sequestering inside their barricaded homes. Isolation is ultimately more dangerous.

Are We Designing Ourselves Into Isolation?

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