Garages

For this week, you are reading J. B. Jackson’s essay on garages. What has happened to garages since Jackson published this piece? Either visit some recently built houses, or visit them virtually online (e.g., realtor.com) to get some idea. How do you interpret these changes?


Garages have changed quite a bit over time, from being isolated from the house to being incorporated with it.

Jackson connects this Post-WWII phenomenon with the use of the house
" as a place for recreation and entertainment." (Jackson 124) He also mentions the multi-purpose
qualities of a garage (storage space, laundry room, etc.) as being instrumental to their popularity.

These qualities have been a constant in the half a century since Jackson wrote this essay, and are reflected in the architectural landscape we see today.

Three-car garages have become even more popular, as houses have expanded in size.

However, detached garages have not lost their popularity.

Also, carriage houses are still being built for those with more cars than children.

The use of garages as storage space has held constant as well.

For the most part, the use of a garage hasn't changed much over the years.

Postwar Culture and Ray's House

Jackson argues that Ray’s house was a very different place than his father’s house, and represented a new order, in some ways freer, In some ways poorer. What does he mean? Reflect on postwar housing as a part of postwar culture. Note that Jackson’s essay was published in 1953, so he was writing as a contemporary cultural observer, not a historian.


Post-WWII, a new way of thinking emerged regarding housing in terms of status, organization, and use. This led to the enrichment of the family in terms of reducing the work associated with home ownership -cooking, cleaning, lawn maintenance; but, in turn, also resulted in the decrease of familial connections to the house and, in some ways, to each other.

Function over form become the norm, with utilitarianism of living spaces deemed to be the highest goal.
This is term led to houses of convenience, cookie cutter cul-de-sacs of identical houses built for use for a specific time frame: for one generation. These were not houses to be handed down, but only built to house a family for as long as it took to raise the children. Jackson comments that architecturally they were not that different from hotels. Considering that they were used as such, this is not surprising. These new types of houses were not to be lived in as such; rather, they were used as transient spaces for the members of the family to eat and sleep in.

Jackson makes an interesting point about the transformative properties of these new houses, how they existed "not to create something new but to transform four separate individuals into a group." (Jackson, 101)
These are not living spaces which impart loyalty or later nostalgia about years gone by; they are built for maximum efficiency. These are houses that will never be homes.

Mrs. Tinkham's insistence on the latest kitchen gadgets and refusal to have a dining room or fireplace (she considers them a waste of time and energy) indicates a shift in what constitutes a house, and the elements that are necessary for them. Rooms and that would have been used for entertaining guests or for family gatherings are turned into multi-purpose or just eliminated as being superfluous. Social status became less dependent on the type and size of house then on your clubs, clothes, and car, so the incentive to build a large, elaborate house was not there anymore. Thus the Tinkham house was a reflection of postwar culture: the idealization of technology, conspicuous consumption through goods, and of minimization regarding living space.