The Drive-in House
The Drive-in House
Stub note: This page treats Webb's Drive-in House as a design-theoretical concept (the chapter's thesis object). It requires fuller treatment as more of Webb's drawn oeuvre and the Archigram corpus are ingested.
Definition
The Drive-in House is Michael Webb's answer to the question posed by Reyner Banham's automobile vernacular: "what might a drive-in house look or behave like?" Its mechanism, in the 1995 horizontal-section drawing: the car is "driven through the intake tube into a clockwise rotating drum," the driver's "Cyclopean line of sight" remaining "steadfastly vertical" in all three phases of rotation — "meaning that the building must rotate around the driver, rather than the driver around the building." The drum's operational geometry "was an attempt to emulate – albeit at a giant scale – the Wankel engine's ingenious rotational harmonies; hence the term 'intake' or 'exhaust' with the car itself playing the part of the gas and air mixture. The analog only takes you so far!" In the final phase "the drum has rotated yet further so that its internal walls now align with those of the house. The car has become the gorgeous object within."
The 1985 "Roof Plan at night" redrawing compresses the mechanism and states the project's thesis: the rotating car and its opening doors "sculpt a shape… a negative of the car from the solid material of the house. The interior walls of the house, then, are a distended negative of the car exterior. The outside is the inside distended, and thus, results in an interior architecture." The house is thus generated from the object it receives: interior architecture as the negative-space extrusion of a mobile object. The occupant is the fixed datum; the architecture is the moving element; the boundary between inside and outside is produced by rotation, seal, and shell — not by wall as static partition.
Key Thinkers
- Michael Webb — author of the project (1968) and its 1985/1995 redrawings; the chapter "Inside out" is its written theory.
- Reyner Banham — the 1965 Letter from America and A Home is not a House (1965), the train of thought from which the project derives (per Two Journeys).
Related Concepts
- Interior Architecture — Webb's negative-space definition joins the wiki's catalogue of the discipline's conceptions: the interior as the "distended negative" of the object it houses.
- Automobile Vernacular — the programmatic context: the drive-in as "a radical change in the basic programming of a building."
- The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the thesis inverts the wall's work: "the outside is the inside distended"; the boundary is generated from within.
- Domestic Interior — the house reprogrammed around the car; the machine as the "gorgeous object within" the domestic interior.
- Interiority — the driver's steadfast vertical center of vision as the interior's fixed datum: "the building must rotate around the driver."
- Consumerism — the car as commodity received into the dwelling like a purchased object; note 4's J.C. Penney drop-off (the self-driving car waiting when you exit).
- Representation — the project exists as drawing: airbrush, Color-Aid paper, Photostat; the sectioned cone and the three-phase rotation as representational inventions.
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
-
Inside out (Webb 2018) — the chapter: the 1995 horizontal section (three-phase rotation, airbrush and Color-Aid), the 1985 "Roof Plan at night" (the distended negative), the Wankel analog, the rotation-around-the-driver principle, and the thesis formula "The outside is the inside distended, and thus, results in an interior architecture."
-
Architectural purgatory (Morey & Alkanoglu 2018) — the programme's 2012 realization: where Webb rotates the building around the car as "the gorgeous object within," Alkanoglu's Auto Residence "reject[s] the garage as an object and implement[s] the car directly into the interior dwelling," making "the car becomes part of the interior organization of the dwelling" — and asks Webb's question forward: "What is a house if not a stationary car?" See car-as-inhabitant, architectural-purgatory.
Open Questions
- Does "the outside is the inside distended" generalize beyond the car-house: can any interior be generated as the negative extrusion of the object it receives (cf. mould and cast)? If so, is Webb's the sixth conception of interior architecture on interior-architecture?
- The project dates from 1968 but was redrawn in 1985 and 1995, and note 4 projects the self-driving car: is the Drive-in House a fixed design or a research program continuously re-tooled by the evolution of the automobile?
- Is the inversion "the building must rotate around the driver, rather than the driver around the building" an anticipation of robotic architecture — the building as machine reconfigured around the stationary occupant?
- What does the project do to domesticity: the car is sealed in ("maintaining seals that would prevent hot or cold external air from entering the house"), becomes "the gorgeous object within" — venerated, displayed — while the house absorbs its negative. Is this the domestic interior's machine-age apotheosis or its parody?
