The great American garage

Abstract

How does one explore the suburban home? Go in through the garage, of course. Sales, bands, suicides, and business startups: The suburban garage is the most culturally flexible space in the entire American domestic environment. In this flexibility, it stands opposed to many of the established notions of suburban domestic context. It is illustrative of the displayed, hidden, and forgotten wonders of the American home. Within the context of this thesis, established interpretations of the garage program are used in the form of metaphor and hyperbole to create differing typologies of the American home. The metaphors themselves have developed out of a very dense genealogy of American suburban histories and trajectories. They have a real history, just as they occupy a very real extant condition of the suburban context. The new suburban house typologies march toward the space of the surreal via the narratives that accompany each of them, allowing for an exploration into the existing domestic condition as well as a feverish and jocular critique of some of the norms of suburban life. The attempt of the research is to take on the exploration of American suburbia, using the very stereotypes and cliches that have come to define it.