No one truly needs a domestic garage to park a car; space is available, if not readily, on city streets. So why do garages exist? The reason may have nothing to do with parking. In their recent book, “Garage,” Olivia Erlanger, an artist, and Luis Ortega Govela, an architect, coin a term, “garageification,” which describes a strange excrescence, initially unrelated to the central functions of the home, acquiring a life of its own and beginning to blend previously separate realms. Garages were, of course, designed to house cars. But they soon became much more: storage spaces, offices, man caves. Entire companies were concocted in a garage, and several styles of music were named after it. The authors of “Garage” locate themselves in the tradition of the German critic Walter Benjamin, who speculated for more than a thousand pages on Paris shopping arcades as emblems of the nineteenth century. For Erlanger and Ortega Govela, who speculate with more brevity, the garage is a latter-day arcade, a symbol of modernity—or maybe postmodernity.

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The true revolution took place when the garage became an essential part of the house, attached and connected by a door. This made it all but another room. Erlanger and Ortega Govela, looking for the origin of the contemporary garage, find it in an unexpected place: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, ....