Car as Inhabitant

Definition

"Car as inhabitant" names the demographic inversion Morey & Alkanoglu trace across the twentieth century: "Over time the car became as much of an inhabitant of architecture as the human." The car occupies, demands services ("The automobile soon needed as much architecture as the residents they transported"), assumes civic presence ("their designers cladding the new structures with glazed terracotta facades and operable windows"), and produces a social condition — "They produce immense density, with the tendency of driving intense loneliness. We sit, watching lives that will never meet ours pass us by."

The concept's second, prospective half is the chapter's design programme: with the electric, self-driving, connected car, the inhabitant can be received indoors — "A car can now be treated as an inhabitant in the interior realm of the home. The garage has found itself empty, unneeded." The "once reviled dweller" is invited "to become an inhabitant, a resident, and begin to understand its desires and needs." Where Webb's Drive-in House rotated the building around the car as "the gorgeous object within," Alkanoglu's Auto Residence makes the car "part of the interior organization of the dwelling" — inhabitant as program, not as stored object.

Key Thinkers

• Anthony Morey & Volkan Alkanoglu — the concept's authors and (in Alkanoglu's case) its builder.
• Michael Webb — the Drive-in House's anticipatory registration: the car as the dwelling's honored guest.
• Le Corbusier — the car "should always be present in his Architecture" (Moneo, quoted in the chapter).

Related Concepts

• Architectural Purgatory — the garage as the disavowed dwelling built for this unacknowledged inhabitant.
• Constant Interior — the condition the co-inhabitation produces: humanity "constantly moving through the interiors of the world."
• Domestic Interior — the interior extended to receive the vehicular resident.
• The Drive-in House — the car-as-object pole ("the gorgeous object within") against the chapter's car-as-program pole.
• Machine for Living — "the car as a machine for the home"; the inhabitant's theoretical pedigree.
• Nonhumans — the co-inhabitation of architecture by its nonhuman occupants.
• Dromology — the speed-system that made the car architecture's co-occupant and its master ("controlled, manipulated, and desperately chasing the goals of the automobile industry").

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Architectural purgatory (Morey & Alkanoglu 2018) — the co-inhabitant thesis ("as much of an inhabitant of architecture as the human"), the loneliness passage, the Auto Residence, and the "once reviled dweller… become an inhabitant, a resident" invitation.

Open Questions

• If the car is an inhabitant, does it have standing in the phenomenology of dwelling — or is it the interior's first nonhuman tenant, a category the dwelling tradition has no room for?
• The chapter's co-inhabitation produces loneliness ("watching lives that will never meet ours pass us by"). Is the car-inhabitant the dromological figure of modern dwelling — occupied but never encountering?
• When the car becomes a resident, who is the host — the house, the garage's ghost, or the human whose rooms are reorganized around the machine's "desires and needs"?