Garage
A Celebration
of the Most Versatile Room Not In The House
By Kira
Obolensky
A Celebration of
the American Garage!
When there is work to be done in America,
people head to the garage. Witness the vast number of ventures born
in the garage: the Hewlett-Packard company, the Apple computer, the
rock band Nirvana.
In the first book to honor the garage as a
unique place of creation and ingenuity (and much more than just a
place for cars), Kira Obolensky explores the many uses for this
ubiquitous space. She takes you on a journey from the hand-carved
garage doors of New Hampshire to a whimsical museum a Midwestern
milkman put in his garage, to the birthplace of the computer
industry on the West Coast.
Along the way, you'll learn how to create a
garage space that is efficient and stylish: whether it's a studio,
greenhouse, library, museum, soundstage or playroom.
- Includes more than 200 color photos of
over 50 garages
- Shows how to create a garage "room" that
meets your specific needs
- Provides options for using existing space
and floor plans for new structures
"All this wonderful, malleable space invites
increasingly creative uses...if something is worth doing, it's worth
doing in the garage. So let the car weather the elements. The garage
is prime real estate, too valuable by far to house mere machinery."
-- USA Today Weekend Magazine
"What a great book! The garage is truly the
most versatile room. And this becomes especially important when your
wife throws you out of the house. Much better than sleeping in the
back yard."
-- Tom Magliozzi, co-host, NPR's "Car Talk"
Introduction:
The idea that you can do something other than park your car in
the garage was already prevalent when I was growing up in the 1960s
and '70s in suburban Houston. When I was a kid, I played in my
neighbor's garage, and I went to church in a different garage.
Nondescript on the outside, the latter garage was attached to a
rambler out near the airport and was a temporary solution to a
building project that was going to bring a Russian Orthodox church
to the area. There was something downright surreal about driving up,
hitting a garage-door opener, and seeing the door rise on a world of
incense, icons, and older Russian ladies (mostly astrophysicists in
the Old Country). The garage, while not the epicenter of my
childhood social life, certainly captured the overflow.
Maybe it's that childhood vision of the garage door opening onto
another, more extraordinary world that gives me such a sense of the
possibilities that lurk behind garage doors. Without a doubt, the
weirdest garage I ever saw had dust from every country in the
Western world and eggs in it shaped like question marks. Such a
collection was amassed by a Midwestern milkman, whose creative
passion found its rightful place in his backyard alley. The most
beautiful garage? Mindful that garage beauty is a subjective thing,
I'd suggest that there's a garage in Wisconsin that shimmers like a
castle on the hill. The most poetic garage: a solitary space with a
screen door and a simple cot for naps. The messiest garage was in
Texas and its owner a collector of used automobile parts and geodes,
mattresses, and pocketknives, all of which found their home in a
series of garagelike sheds.
While the attic holds memories of the past, the garage lives in
the present tense. If the house is the ego, the garage is the id of
the domestic setting. It's a container -- for cars, certainly, but
also for the dreams and passions of the house's occupant.
My own garage was built for a Model T, and then someone later
added a little extension out the front. Right now, my garage is
nothing more than a container with potential: In a snowstorm it
holds the Volvo, and the rest of the time it houses the things we
like to use when it's warm, like bicycles and gardening equipment.
From the moment we moved into this house, we've considered the
garage as a place of great potential. At any point in time, it can
serve to answer -- at least, conceptually -- the latest problem our
1918 Prairie School home presents. At one time we considered turning
the garage into a guest cottage. Lately, as we contemplate the birth
of a child and the loss of a bedroom that's been functioning as an
office, we imagine the garage anew as a combination office for my
husband and me, as an art studio for my husband, or as a teenager's
hangout.
That's one of the things I hope this book does for you: help you
imagine the garage as a place that can capture the changes with
which life presents us. One's garage is a highly personal space, not
usually intended for public viewing. So it has been an honor to be
invited into so many garages. I hope they prove as interesting and
inspirational to you, as you consider the potential of the place
where you park your car.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Chapter 1: In the Garage
Chapter 2: Shops & Studios
Chapter 3: Garage Ventures
Chapter 4: Garage Leisure
Chapter 5: Living in the Garage
Chapter 6: Parking in the Garage
Soft-cover, 9-1/2 x 10 in., 216 pages, with color
photos and drawings
Published 2003
ISBN: 978-1-56158-645-5
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