CITY SMART: How to thrive in the urban environment of Southern California. : The Garage Evolves From Stable to Staple : Architecture Reflects the Changing Role of Automobiles in American Life

Drive down the streets of any modern suburb and it’s easy to see who gets the biggest bedroom in most houses: the family car.

In fact, a good-sized garage can easily make up more than a third of an average house.

But it wasn’t always this way. In the beginning, the garage was nothing more than an afterthought in the back yard. Its transformation into the single largest feature of modern homes reflects how the car has evolved over the last century from a curious toy--a “chrome-plated bathtub,” according to one early commentator--into a necessary member of the family.

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The risk of automotive mishap was so high with early cars that owners who built garages too close to their houses faced increased fire insurance premiums.

As cars caught on as more than just amusements, construction companies across the United States began manufacturing prefabricated garages that could be erected with a few screws in the back yard.

The back yard was still the most logical place to build a garage because it was rarely used as anything but a service area to dry clothes or toss ashes or accept deliveries from the alleys that crisscrossed old neighborhoods. Gardening and socializing with neighbors took place in the front yard.

But the car was changing all that.

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“It was a weird dynamic,” said Drummond Buckley, a private urban planner in Berkeley. “The effects of the automobile on the street made people want to have a back yard they could use.”

The casual friendliness of the front porch was slowly replaced by what Drummond calls the “cult of the back yard” as a private retreat from the outside world.

Not surprisingly, people were loath to have their new back-yard refuges cluttered by unsightly car sheds. By the 1930s and ‘40s, manufacturers were making cars that emitted fewer noxious odors and self-destructed less often, making it more practical to put the vehicle closer to the house--if not attached directly.

This evolution was carried out naturally, as car owners, out of practical necessity, decided where to store their Model Ts. But before the garage really became part of the house, the whole notion of car-as-home captured the imagination of architects and designers.

In 1922, one architect remarked: “My heart is architecturally singing with delight at the fresh new host of problems the garage has opened up.” In other words, he relished the chance of designing a garage.

By the 1930s, the garage was “frequently coupled in the client’s and architect’s minds with the kitchen and the bathroom as an essential, practical, machine-like element that was fully incorporated, akin to plumbing and heating, into the dwelling,” wrote architectural historian David Gebhard in an essay on the garage’s evolution.

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The debate then became how to best incorporate the garage into the overall scheme of the house: whether to hide the garage or glorify it. For the most part, keeping the garage as the most obvious entrance to the house won.

“In California, garages and driveways were often so prominent that the house could almost be described as an accessory to the garage,” wrote Kenneth T. Jackson in his book “Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States.”

Even car-crazy California was not nearly so innovative in garage design as one might think, although it can take credit for at least two innovations.

Some credit builders in the San Fernando Valley with first connecting the garage to the kitchen with a door. And architects in hillside neighborhoods overcame seemingly impossible sites, dropping garages at the street so houses could dominate higher up on the slope.

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During the 1940s and 1950s, open-air carports were popular because they showed off the garage and the car, seen by that time as a wonder of modernity. Most cars were then clean and sleek enough to warrant proud display in full view and cars were treated as plug-in rooms to the house.

Even the word carport evoked futuristic images of adventure, the perfect symbol of a boundless America. But the carport fell out of style in large part because it imposed a heavy burden on homeowners who were required to keep not only their cars spotless but the garage as well.

In fact, garages in many suburban neighborhoods have not housed a car in years. They are instead stocked with lawn mowers and workbenches, stacked with old junk and used as de facto dens, all hidden by different doors.

Today, though, those on architecture’s cutting edge seek to tuck the garage back behind the house as it was in the days of Henry Ford, in an effort to lure people back out onto their front lawns and porches. New Urbanist designers such as Peter Calthorpe in San Francisco argue that reclaiming neighborhoods from the automobile will create a stronger sense of community.

But Drummond said he sat on a recent plane flight next to a woman who lives in one of these new neighborhoods. She spent a good deal of the ride complaining that she never sees her neighbors coming home from work--because they all park behind their houses.

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Evolution of the Garage

Once an afterthought in the backyard, the garage has crept gradually forward over the past 80 years to a prominent spot in residential architecture. Eventually, the marriage of garage and house was complete with the addition of doors allowing drivers to walk directly from their cars to the kitchen.