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:
