New Book Examines the Relationship between American Cars and Houses

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Belgian freelance journalists Thijs Demeulmeester and Bert Voet cover architecture and automobiles, respectively, and both are obsessed with the pinnacle designs in their respective fields that occurred in the middle portions of the 20th century. So when they decided to collaborate on a photographic book documenting the global intersection between their interests, a perfect portmanteau formed as their title: Carchitecture: Houses with Horsepower.

Now, the two have returned with a fresh iteration of the same idea, this one focused solely on pairing midcentury-modern houses and vehicles in the USA: "Carchitecture USA: American Houses with Horsepower"(Lannoo, $55.00), and it is a delightful photographic romp through midcentury America's obsession with automobiles as accessories to, and for, the era's architecture.

The history of architectural imagery, according to Demeulmeester, is replete with "designers who understood that combining cars with their buildings makes the image more dynamic and strong." He dates this practice back 100 years, at least, to the Swiss-French Modernist pioneer Le Corbusier, who always included, if not designed his increasingly megalithic projects around, the automobile. But, he notes, it took an automobile-obsessed American architect to integrate car and dwelling most directly.

"The idea that cars become a part of the family, and a part of the house too, is a very American idea," Demeulmeester says. "I think it was Frank Lloyd Wright who was the very first architect who made the car enter into the house, designing the first house with an in-house garage. So I think that's the birth of the car as a member of the family." (Both Wright and Le Corbusier designed radical cars of their own.)

Demeulmeester and Voet are not professional photographers, so for the book, they sought out and licensed photos of modern houses with period-correct cars in the driveway or otherwise in the shot. They then culled them and corralled them into meaningful chapter categories. "We collected hundreds of images through different sources. And then we sat together three, four, five, six times to sort them out and to give them a sort of ranking of what was the ideal," Voet says. "And the car was as important as the house."

One of the richest imagistic seams they mine throughout the book is in the picturesque, and perfectly preserved, mid-mod landscapes of Southern California. Los Angeles, a company town created as a stage set, features prominently. But even more compelling is the desert playground a couple hours east, by car.

"I think maybe the best examples were the ones we found in and around Palm Springs, where combining cars with architecture is a game, maybe a local sport," Demeulmeester says. (So much so that there is a theory that the region's carports, open to the precipitationless environment, and to the public, were designed as showoff showcase vitrines for a homeowner's vehicle.)

In fact, so inextricably linked are the car and the home in America (and in contemporary American collection and preservation in both realms) that this duality presented the authors with one of their greatest difficulties in selecting images. Certain blue-chip examples of midcentury automotive design seemed to hold sway also with fans of midcentury architecture. Those cars thus appeared too frequently in the imagery the pair were considering. "One of the difficulties was to prevent a lot of repeating cars, because there were a lot of good images where it was always a Porsche 911 or a Mercedes SL or a Jaguar E-type in the photo. We tried to find some diversity in in the cars," Voet says.

The authors see the interrelation between cars and houses continuing, if not continuing to grow deeper, in the contemporary era. Though they are not certain that this is all for the best. "There's an essay in the book about how the car can even more become a part of the house. For example, with the bi-directional energy exchange between electric vehicles and the home electrical system," Voet says, describing the way that, for example, a big EV battery can be charged from the home off-peak overnight, and then connected to the house's power grid and used to provide electricity during peak daytime hours.

"But [this] connection between car and home becomes mainly or purely practical," Voet says. "And the passion and the psychological layers of connection, well, these tend to disappear."

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