Architectural purgatory: The car, the garage, and the house

Author: Anthony Morey & Volkan Alkanoglu Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 38 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge) Raw file: raw/chapters/morey-alkanoglu-2018-architectural-purgatory.md

Summary

The chapter reads the garage as the twentieth century's unintended architectural masterpiece-in-reverse: a space "devoid of function and implied form, and born from immediate response," produced when architecture's reluctant encounter with the automobile generated "a third, alien formation" belonging fully to neither parent. The garage is "the architectural equivalent of purgatory" — neither interior nor exterior, neither object nor room — a "parasitic object attached against the home's will" that nevertheless "forged the next fifty years of the field." Against this inheritance the authors (one of whom, Alkanoglu, contributes his own built case, the Auto Residence / Park Residence, 2012) argue that the self-driving, electric, connected car — now technology rather than machine, appliance rather than engine — makes possible the absorption of the car into the dwelling and the reclamation of the garage's volume: "the car is no longer an object but a program." The chapter closes with a children's-play theory of design: only those who see space without the hard line of interior/exterior can undo the purgatory.

Key Claims

• The garage is the architectural equivalent of purgatory — a liminal, categorically homeless space: "Neither Design nor Function, Neither Circulation nor Program, Neither Space nor Place, Neither Object nor Inhabitant, Neither Interior nor Exterior…" It was produced as "a third, alien formation" when the home "reluctant[ly] accept[ed] this foreign intruder" fought back — the garage as the "outlier of interior space," the offspring "belonging to neighbor parents fully."
• The garage, not the car, was the automobile's real architectural consequence: "Paradoxically, the automobile spawned one of the largest threats to architecture: the garage. Devoid of function and implied form, and born from immediate response, the garage forged the next fifty years of the field."
• The car became an architectural co-inhabitant: "Over time the car became as much of an inhabitant of architecture as the human. They produce immense density, with the tendency of driving intense loneliness."
• Mobility produced a constant interior condition: "Today's constant stream of movement finds humanity constantly moving through the interiors of the world, only viewing glimpses of the exterior environment. Inside our homes, automobiles, and offices, the world has become a constant interior." Once differentiated by highways, "cities became similar, only identified by their highway exit numbers."
• Architecture's encounter with the automobile inverted its founding subject: "Architecture had historically been focused on the interaction and inhabitation of the human figure… yet architecture has found itself controlled, manipulated, and desperately chasing the goals of the automobile industry." The home "labeled as a machine for living brought upon the formation of the car as a machine for the home."
• The canonical modernists had already received the car into the house: Le Corbusier's 1927 Casa Weissen photograph "layered with an automobile and a female model," Villa Savoye's lower level "articulation that allowed for the full turn radius of a car, empowering the car to both enter the interior shell of the home and dominate the initial design of the home"; Frank Lloyd Wright "designed both for and around automobiles," with the Guggenheim's spiral rotunda owing "its most distinctive interior elements… to his affinity for the automobile and the space they occupied." Yet "the automobile is not a child of architecture at its inception; in fact, it could be said it was made to bypass architecture."
• The garage has been the dwelling's non-space of storage and exile: the "proud marvel of the industrial age, the sign of modernism, technology, and design found itself located next to tools, Christmas lights, and washing machines. Architecture had no response, no assimilation, and no integration – only space. It was an object, one that was used as needed and forgotten when not."
• The garage's purgatorial marginality made it the incubator of reinvention: "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), all formed and fostered initially as outliers and outcast in society, were all founded within this invisible armature of suburbia."
• The machine/technology split is the car's Achille's heel and its escape: "Society has found itself welcoming technology within the setting of the home, while uneasy of the term machine, which has come to imply dirt, noise, and pollution. Here is where the car has found its Achilles heel. While pursuing the Darwinian desire for survival, the automobile has turned to technology to survive."
• The self-driving, electric car is a program, not a machine: "What is a car with no driver? What is a car with no destination? What is a car that no longer needs a road to travel? What is a car if it drives itself? What is a house if not a stationary car? Modern automobiles resemble building programs rather than dirty machines."
• The designed case: Volkan Alkanoglu Design's Auto Residence (2012) "shows how the simple choice to reject the garage as an object and implement the car directly into the interior dwelling can create a forum of conversation between the two. This allows both to resonate off each other, parts of the dwelling become the car, and the car becomes part of the interior organization of the dwelling."
• Technology has dissolved architecture's representational conventions along the way: "It has destroyed the corner by allowing curves to smooth it into oblivion; it has disfigured poché… into a graphic, no longer a negative space of conversation."
• The chapter's design-theoretical ground is the child's unclassified space: "To a child, space is not confined by architectural history. There is no hard line such as interior or exterior. Their playrooms allow for new associations and the erasing of old ones. They exist in a relentless state of infinite possibilities… To them, a garage is not storage, but an endless cave of possibilities."
• The chiasmus that closes the argument: "The car has become the garage, and the garage has become the dwelling; the car is no longer an object but a program. This absorption of the automobile into the external shell of architecture has slowly allowed the garage to exist, and now the garage has been absorbed into the interior shell of the home, opening new and unexplored architectural challenges."
• Media fictions as design trajectory: The Jetsons' car that "folds into a briefcase," Oblivion's folding motorcycle, and MIT's Folding CITYCAR show that "form rarely follows function when function is constantly updated and progressing" — "Does a house still look like a house, or does a car still look like a car? Should they?"
• Connectivity dissolves the car's premise: "If connectivity is no longer based on proximity, is a car needed for relevance or transport? If you can talk, eat, and sleep in a space that is in constant movement, what is the benefit of community, neighborhoods, or towns?"

Connections

Concepts: architectural-purgatory · car-as-inhabitant · constant-interior · automobile-vernacular · drive-in-house · machine-for-living · dromology · liminality · poche · everyday-architecture · domestic-interior · inside-outside-dialectic · space-of-flows · non-places · mechanization · play · interiority Authors: marinic-gregory (editor) · alkanoglu-volkan · morey-anthony · le-corbusier · banham-reyner (the automobile-vernacular lineage) Debates: form-vs-program (the car "no longer an object but a program"; form "rarely follows function when function is constantly updated") · modernity-and-architecture · static-vs-dynamic-architecture Related source notes: Inside out (Webb 2018) — the Drive-in House, the car "received into the dwelling"; Inside-out and outside-in (Vanucci 2018) — the machine/technology and envelope cluster; "Living" rooms (Brownell 2018) — the machine-for-living reversal; Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the dynamic/technology interior; Hawthorne 2023 — the Las Vegas automobile context.

Direct Quotes

"Paradoxically, the automobile spawned one of the largest threats to architecture: the garage. Devoid of function and implied form, and born from immediate response, the garage forged the next fifty years of the field." (opening)

"In the end, a third, alien formation was produced, one belonging to neighbor parents fully, and instead, we received the outlier of interior space: the garage."

"Today's constant stream of movement finds humanity constantly moving through the interiors of the world, only viewing glimpses of the exterior environment. Inside our homes, automobiles, and offices, the world has become a constant interior."

"Over time the car became as much of an inhabitant of architecture as the human. They produce immense density, with the tendency of driving intense loneliness."

"Once differentiated, cities became similar, only identified by their highway exit numbers."

"Architecture had historically been focused on the interaction and inhabitation of the human figure. It has long been focused with this realm of society, yet architecture has found itself controlled, manipulated, and desperately chasing the goals of the automobile industry."

"The home being labeled as a machine for living brought upon the formation of the car as a machine for the home."

"Architecture's fantastic response was the garage – the architectural equivalent of purgatory; a space that has largely become one of disarray, storage, and exile of history."

"The automobile, proud marvel of the industrial age, the sign of modernism, technology, and design found itself located next to tools, Christmas lights, and washing machines. Architecture had no response, no assimilation, and no integration – only space."

"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), all formed and fostered initially as outliers and outcast in society, were all founded within this invisible armature of suburbia."

"Society has found itself welcoming technology within the setting of the home, while uneasy of the term machine, which has come to imply dirt, noise, and pollution. Here is where the car has found its Achilles heel."

"What is a car with no driver? What is a car with no destination? What is a car that no longer needs a road to travel? What is a car if it drives itself? What is a house if not a stationary car?"

"Modern automobiles resemble building programs rather than dirty machines."

"The car is no longer a machine, but technology."

"The idea is that the cars of the future are playrooms or multifunctional rooms that are part-house-part-car and capable of things that only children can imagine. The car becomes a space of programmable possible impossibilities; it becomes the object that can survive falls from the tallest bookshelf."

"There is always more to an object that the object itself."

"It has destroyed the corner by allowing curves to smooth it into oblivion; it has disfigured poché… into a graphic, no longer a negative space of conversation."

"To a child, space is not confined by architectural history. There is no hard line such as interior or exterior."

"To them, a garage is not storage, but an endless cave of possibilities."

"It reinforces the idea that form rarely follows function when function is constantly updated and progressing."

"The car has become the garage, and the garage has become the dwelling; the car is no longer an object but a program."

"A car can now be treated as an inhabitant in the interior realm of the home. The garage has found itself empty, unneeded."

"These new norms grant the home's interior to bleed to the exterior, and the once isolated exterior to the infinite interior, allowing us to invite the once reviled dweller to become an inhabitant, a resident."

"We must understand how and why we have the programmatic and social structures in our homes and find ways to reinvent the whole, not the part."

Moneo, quoted: "Architecture must also assume its role in assimilating and integrating the automobile, find a place for it in its agenda. I don't think anyone would be surprised if I were to say that architecture so far made very little effort to try and coexist with the automobile… contemporary architecture 'mistreats' the automobile."

Open Questions

• Is the garage's purgatorial absence of program the very condition that made it the incubator of Silicon-Valley-style reinvention — and if architecture reclaims the garage's volume for dwelling, does it destroy the outlier-space that "allowed for unconventional ideas to explode"?
• "What is a house if not a stationary car?" — is the drive-in-house lineage (Webb's rotating drum, Alkanoglu's Auto Residence, Banham's portable interior) converging on one thesis: that the dwelling is the car's rest state? What would an architecture take the other direction — the car as stationary house in motion?
• Does the machine/technology distinction ("The car is no longer a machine, but technology") hold as more than rhetoric — and does the wiki's mechanization history need a technology-vs-machine periodization to absorb it?
• The chapter says the automobile "was made to bypass architecture": is the garage therefore the first architecture designed by refusal — a typology formed as the negative of acceptance? How would that reframing change the history of the threshold between street, garage, and home?
• If connectivity replaces proximity ("If connectivity is no longer based on proximity, is a car needed for relevance or transport?"), what happens to the space-of-flows — and does the constant interior dissolve into a flow without any exterior left to glimpse?