Architectural Purgatory

Definition

"Architectural purgatory" is Morey & Alkanoglu's name for the garage — the space produced when twentieth-century architecture, "reluctant to fully accept this foreign intruder," met the automobile: "a third, alien formation was produced, one belonging to neighbor parents fully, and instead, we received the outlier of interior space: the garage." The chapter's epigraph exhausts the categorical pairs it escapes: "Neither Design nor Function, Neither Circulation nor Program, Neither Space nor Place, Neither Object nor Inhabitant, Neither Interior nor Exterior…" The garage is "the architectural equivalent of purgatory; a space that has largely become one of disarray, storage, and exile of history" — "an eyesore or an architectural misfit to any comprehensive layout and parti; stuck on the side, hidden behind brick veneers, disguised as an extension of the housing mass," known "as a parasitic object attached against the home's will."

The concept has a productive edge. Purgatory's categorical homelessness is also its generative power: "This purgatory of a space has allowed for unconventional ideas to explode; creations such as Amazon, HP, Apple, Nirvana (and in general all young bands)… were all founded within this invisible armature of suburbia." The purgatorial space is where the discipline's unclassified remainder accumulates — and the site from which, the authors argue, the volume "traditionally been allocated to an uninhabited space within the home" can now be reclaimed, because "the car has become the garage, and the garage has become the dwelling."

Key Thinkers

• Anthony Morey & Volkan Alkanoglu — the concept's authors; Alkanoglu's Auto Residence (2012) as the built dissolution of the garage.
• Le Corbusier — the prehistory: Casa Weissen's staged car-and-model photograph; Villa Savoye's turn-radius ground floor; the machine-for-living that "brought upon the formation of the car as a machine for the home."
• Reyner Banham — the automobile-vernacular lineage from which the chapter's car-house thesis derives.

Related Concepts

• Car as Inhabitant — the garage's reason: the car "became as much of an inhabitant of architecture as the human"; when the car is received into the interior, the garage "has found itself empty, unneeded."
• Liminality — the garage as the dwelling's resident limbo: neither inside nor outside, neither room nor tool-shed — a liminality one stores rather than passes through.
• Automobile Vernacular — the roadside landscape the car produced; the garage is its domestic half, the vernacular's "invisible armature of suburbia."
• Constant Interior — the mobility condition that makes the world "a constant interior" and the garage the type-space of moving-through.
• The Drive-in House — Webb's pre-emptive answer: the car received into the dwelling as "the gorgeous object within," the negative of the purgatory's parking bay.
• Machine for Living — the dictum's extension: "the home being labeled as a machine for living brought upon the formation of the car as a machine for the home."
• Domestic Interior — the interior that disavowed its own annex; the chapter's programme to reabsorb the annexed volume.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Architectural purgatory: The car, the garage, and the house (Morey & Alkanoglu 2018) — the concept's source: the purgatory definition and epigraph, the "third, alien formation," the storage-and-exile passage, the garage-startup thesis, and the closing chiasmus ("the car has become the garage, and the garage has become the dwelling").
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the purgatory's production history, the concept's practitioner ledger: the migration narrative (garage from detached rear structure → attached rear → side → "tacked on to the front of the house to allow for maximum flexibility in the interior floor plan," p. 88) and its verdict — "With the garage pulled way out in front of the house, and the entrance pulled way back… most often the exterior appearance of the house loses out to interior efficiency. This is a prime reason for why our streetscapes look so bad!" (p. 89); the purgatory's economics ("the average homeowner pays more to house his or her automobile than they do to house their children," p. 88); the purgatory's interior use — storage overflow, workbenches, the "junky garage" visitors must not be routed through (pp. 92, 157); and the escape routes catalogued (garage courts, tandem and turned garages, rear-loaded alleys, breezeways, rooms over garages, pp. 89–97). Where Morey & Alkanoglu give the purgatory's theory, Wentling gives its siting rules — the chapter of the industry's war with its own streetscapes (see automobile-vernacular, car-as-inhabitant, inhabitant-and-visitor).

Open Questions

• Is the purgatorial absence of program the cause of the garage's inventive reuse (the startup-garage thesis) — and if architecture reclaims the volume, does it destroy the condition that made it generative?
• Can the garage be re-typed deliberately — a design for the outlier-space — or does any designed garage cease to be purgatorial by definition?
• How does the garage's domestic liminality relate to the wiki's other between-spaces (waiting room, disciplinary frontier, terrain vague) — and is there a general theory of architectural limbo beneath them?