PORCH PASSAGES:
YOUTH WORKSHOP
Knight Foundation | Miami, FL | 2024
Drawing from Cornelius Tulloch’s Porch Passages series, celebrating Miami’s porch architecture as a living archive of Black and Caribbean diasporic design, this eight‑day youth program married analog making with digital fabrication to cultivate both cultural literacy and technical fluency.
At the Marshall Davis African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, students researched and observed local porch ornamentation, breeze blocks, and ironwork, learning to read façades as historical texts; crafted place‑based narratives through guided poetry exercises, building vocabulary that connects personal environments to broader urban and diasporic landscapes; and developed collage skills with rapid‑iteration techniques (led by Arsimmer), exploring composition, color, form and text‑image integration.
At Miami Fab Lab, summer interns translated art into digital form by creating their own designs, mastering Illustrator trace, cleanup and nesting for CNC/laser workflows while embodying the fabricator’s role by understanding material properties, machine constraints, and the technical responsibilities of translating an analog vision into a technical file and subsequently a fabricated final product.
The workshops aimed to promote critical observation and documentation by seeing architecture as narrative and heritage and exploring creative storytelling through honing poetic and visual languages to articulate personal and communal identities. Students discovered the process of iterative design thinking from analog sketches to final collage selections and, at Fab Lab particularly, became proficient in bridging art and technology through hands-on digital fabrication methods like CNC/laser practice. Collaborative exchanges across generations and disciplines reinforced the value of mentorship and shared authorship.
By combining cultural scholarship with maker‑centered practice, Tulloch and McCoy provided a toolkit, from archival research to fabrication, that empowered participants to shape Miami’s future built environment. These experiences will encourage students to return to their neighborhoods as informed cultural stewards, aware of their role in the city’s ongoing evolution and empowered to continue that journey in their futures.