Garages

On paper, a garage is a utilitarian box designed to protect an internal combustion engine from the rain. But in the mythology of the modern world, the garage is something much more sacred. It is the only part of the house where the " rules" of domestic life don’t apply. It is a frontier of oil stains, half-finished projects, and the specific, dusty smell of sawdust and old lawnmower gas.

It is the home’s “Subconscious”—the place where we put the things we aren’t ready to use, but aren’t brave enough to throw away.

From Horses to Horsepower

The garage is a relatively new architectural invention. Before the car, wealthy families had “carriage houses” to store buggies and horses (which were kept far away because horses are loud and smell like, well, horses).

When the Model T arrived, people initially parked them in “liveries” or public parking structures. It wasn’t until the 1920s that the garage moved closer to the house, and not until the post-WWII suburban boom that it became “attached.” Once the garage was connected to the kitchen, it transformed from an outbuilding into the main entrance of the American home.

The Incubator of Giants

There is a specific phenomenon known as “Garage Mythos.” For some reason, the combination of a concrete floor, bad lighting, and a lack of air conditioning is the perfect environment for global disruption.

The list of “Garage Startups” is a modern hagiography:

Apple: Jobs and Wozniak in the Cupertino garage.
Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin in Susan Wojcicki’s garage.
Amazon: Jeff Bezos in a garage in Bellevue, Washington.
Disney: Walt and Roy started in their uncle’s one-car garage.

The garage is the ultimate “low-stakes” environment. Because the overhead is zero and the floor is concrete, you are allowed to fail, get messy, and break things. It is the only place where “innovation” is actually allowed to be ugly.

The Ecosystem of the Pegboard

Technically, a garage is defined by its organization—or the aspirational attempt at it. The Pegboard is the central altar of this space.

It represents the human desire to impose order on chaos. By tracing the outline of a wrench in Sharpie, the garage-dweller creates a “home” for an object. The garage is also the primary habitat of the “Garage Fridge”—a venerable, humming appliance from 1994 that contains nothing but half-empty bags of ice and the specific brand of beer that the homeowner’s spouse doesn’t want taking up room in the “real” kitchen.

The Largest Moving Part

Architecturally, the garage door is often the largest moving part of any residential structure. It is a heavy, spring-loaded beast that relies on Torsion Springs—tightly wound coils of steel that hold enough potential energy to be genuinely terrifying if they snap. This door is the drawbridge to the modern castle; when it hums open, it signals that the world of “work” is over and the world of “projects” has begun.

The Sanctuary of the “In-Between”