Notes on Attached Garages
To be completely honest, the garage is a necessity in America, and to be even more honest, it’s very hard to properly incorporate a garage into a smallish house without there being some kind of architectural awkwardness.
Incorporating the garage is a very difficult situation in home design, where you have a certain amount of square-footage per lot and the average American family owns at least two vehicles.
With modern houses, it is easier to conceal the garage because it is easily assimilated into the characteristic minimal, boxlike forms.
The garage is essentially a box, and looks at home on modernist houses not only because of its form, but because of its context. Modern architecture and the industrial revolution went hand in hand. The car and the modern house were born at the same time, and always had one another as context.
In the context of houses designed to look like architectural styles originating before the invention of the car, the attached garage becomes difficult to integrate into the overall design. Attached garages on traditional-style houses will always be in some way architecturally anachronistic. This is why, in neighborhoods filled with historical houses, the building of an attached house is usually banned by neighborhood or homeowners associations.
Why did we start attaching garages to our houses anyway?
Early garages imitated the carriage houses people were used to storing their horse drawn buggies in. These buildings were separate from the main estate, though they often mimicked the architecture of the main home. Exterior, separate garages maintained the historical context of the carriage houses of old, allowing historical estates to easily assimilate their aesthetics with the burgeoning car culture.
The passing of the Federal Highway Act in 1921 enabled an explosion of road building, and more and more people were buying cars to get from place to place. However, most plots of land in the new post-war suburbs were much too small for a carriage house, and it is in this time period that attached car-storage structures were born.
The carport was a solution in the early to mid 20th century, one that Frank Lloyd Wright, an early adopter of attached garages, helped to popularize. Before the development of mid-century modernism, carports were rarely integrated into the architecture of the house, and were often ad-hoc structures either attached after the fact to the side of the house, or were separate freestanding structures. Carports seen on historical houses are in fact often additions made by later owners.
Attached garages with entry into the house began to appear around 1941; however, it wasn’t until the late 50s and early 60s that the attached garage became a standard feature.
In a 1,000 square foot house, the percent of space devoted to car storage was only 15% in 1930, but by 1960, that number reached 45%.
The attached garage was heavily marketed as a luxury feature at the time, much like the gameroom or the firepit is today. The selling point of the attached garage was convenience - being able to enter and exit your car without interference of the conditions outside, and a short distance from the car to your interior door so your lazy ass can carry all your groceries in at once.
However, as family life in the home began to change during and after the post-WWII boom, garages began to serve multiple purposes as the century progressed, including much-needed storage space, and, for most families (who didn’t have the lot space for a separate shed) a makeshift workshop where repairs and other messy activities could take place without worrying about messing up the interior of the house.
While attached garages will always be somewhat out of place on traditional-style houses for the reasons previously mentioned, there are ways to incorporate an attached garage into a traditional home that, although anachronistic, maintain a sense of architectural harmony.
The attached garage is about picking and choosing your battles, as it will never be ideal architecturally (on a traditionally styled house). The main design flaw of attached garages is that the house becomes a garage with a house attached rather than the other way around. This is clearly demonstrated in the first photo of this post. Here are some pointers (and lols) after the gap:
Front facing garages are the most difficult to integrate into a traditionally styled elevation because the garage door is a huge void.
Houses with front-facing garages usually have them for one reason and one reason alone: lot size. There is literally no other place to put the garage, or, anything else for that matter.
The best thing you can do if you’re stuck with a front facing garage is to create rhythm and maintain material consistency. For example, in the above photo, changing the design of the garage door to one that has some kind of division in the middle, splitting the giant void into two smaller voids.
Changing the garage door material to wood instead of aluminum creates a sense of similarity by matching the design of the front door. Changing the windows on the garage door to match those on the front facade will help as well.
That’s right, folks. A different garage door would make this exterior 100% better.
If you’re curious, the front facing garage doesn’t have to always be an eyesore. Here is an example of a suburban home with decent garage integration.
Side Facing Garages (aka the rich man’s garage)
If you happen to have lot size to spare, you can always conceal the garage by having the garage door face perpendicular to the front elevation. Unless you live on a corner lot, this often involves having a rather large and windy driveway.
This is an example of a house well-proportioned side facing garage:
This is an example of a poorly proportioned house with a poorly-proportioned side facing garage:
That’s all for the attached garage for now, folks– though I have no doubt that it will be rearing its head again here sometime soon.
Sources:
McAlester, Virginia, A. Lee McAlester, Lauren Jarrett, and Juan Rodriguez-Arnaiz. A Field Guide to American Houses: The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America’s Domestic Architecture. 2nd ed. NY: Knopf, 2013
Seiler, Cotten. Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. University of Chicago Press, 2009.
All real estate photos were taken from screenshots of Zillow.com. The use of this content is for the purposes of education, satire, and parody, consistent with 17 USC §107.
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