“We have taken the garage to be the most important architectural form of the 20th century.”

This is the provocation that drew me in and inspired me to consider each and every subsequent one offered by artist Olivia Erlanger and architect Luis Ortega Govela. ‘Garage’ has a lot of arguments about the nature and significance of the automobile garage - none of which, I quickly learned, are supported by footnotes. This is rare for a book that focuses on the history of a subject, especially one published by the formidable MIT Press.

Though I was dismayed at firstby the lack of footnotes, I soon learned the importance and significance of their absence: ‘Garage’ isn’t a book about garages so much as the mythology they have inspired and the falsehood of their popular history. The histories revisited—from Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘invention’ of the room type to the supposedly-single-handed creation of Apple in a Silicon Valley garage—are riddled with inaccuracies and self-aggrandizement. “In the garage,” the authors caution, “truth becomes irrelevant.”

Over the course of the several weeks it took me to get through the book, my summation of its constellation of arguments to friends and family was always the same: “if the suburban home is the architectural symbol of heteronormativity and convention, then the garage is its opposing force, as the architectural symbol of fluidity and nonconformity.” 

This is certainly not the only argument made by the authors, but it is one that had particular resonance for myself, a long-time suburbanite that saw my own two-car garage hold a myriad of informal and temporary functions whenever vacated by parents off to work. While the rest of the house had a place and purpose for every object of furniture it held, the garage was relatively indeterminate; a ping-pong room one moment and a storage room in which to revisit youthful drawings the next. Erlanger and Govela’s book speaks to that fluidity and matches it with colorful language and flexible narration.

...the book is more about the strangeness of humanity that necessitated the garage than the garage itself.

Throughout the book, the authors refer to what they call the ‘garage myth,’ which may be summarized as the belief that the garage has been the site of innovation in the modern era—the rough-hewn antithesis to the sterile, conventional spaces of production (think corporate America and the open office). 

This was the myth that Hewlett Packard capitalized upon to rebrand itself as an edgy innovator, and it’s the myth that allowed Frank Lloyd Wright to, according to the authors, “construct a new image of himself and his projects.” The garage band, the garage sale and ‘Garageification’ (a method of “transforming any physical space to better suit one’s needs”) are just a few of the spatial/economic tropes held under a microscope by the authors, as it becomes increasingly clear that the book is more about the strangeness of humanity that necessitated the garage than the garage itself.

The authors convincingly tie the garage and its supposed role in 20th century innovation to the influence that myth and misinformation can have on reality.

The garage has become, in other words, the spatial manifestation of the darkest and most genuinely felt recesses of the human mind. This is a place where we might not only hide away our worst instincts but also misinterpret them, either for our own peace of mind or to construct a more palatable reality around it. Reality Distortion is the term used by the authors to describe this phenomenon, borrowed from Apple employees “to describe [Steve] Jobs’ ability to make anyone believe in his dream of a future not yet founded.” The authors convincingly tie the garage and its supposed role in 20th century innovation to the influence that myth and misinformation can have on reality.

Garage is an unusual book for an unusual time in history. At a moment when ‘fake news’ is accused and defended from all directions, this book has untapped potential as political theory. Erlanger and Govela elevate the humble architectural garage into a metaphor for how far we have strayed from what we thought we were so close to until so recently: objectivity, truth, authenticity and historical accuracy. It is my hope that Garage inspires future authors to open up and produce new histories of subjects long thought to be closed cases: a new history of the kitchen, the bedroom, the backyard, and perhaps even newer histories of the common garage.