Taj Mahal on a Cul de Sac: Concrete blocks, Carports and Architectural Appropriation

Abstract

Taj Mahal on a Cul de Sac: Concrete blocks, Carports and Architectural Appropriation MATTHEW S. RoBINSON Nestled comfortably alongside countless ranch houses of the 1950s and 1960s in the American South, the humble carport performs the prosaic function of providing cheap and convenient protection for a favorite automobile against sun, rain and bird droppings.1 Carports came in many shapes and sizes, from small, single car designs to multi-car extravaganzas with plenty of space for all-weather entertaining. Yet, most carports shared a basic program: theywere incorporated into one end of the house, continuing its roofprofile, and opened either perpendicularly or directly onto the street (fig. 1). Regardless of its orientation, the carport shared at least one wall with the house, leaving the other three sides open for a variety of treatments. Some designs continued the brick cladding or wood siding of the rest of the house; others incorporated brick screen walls, round steel columns, or wrought iron ornament. Among the more common materials for carports were decorative concrete block screens. Although the blocks came in a variety of patterns, one of the most popular was the interlocking cross and circle of the so called Taj Maria block pattern - a pattern that first appeared on the other side of the globe in New Delhi, India, far from the manicured lawns ofAmerican suburbia (fig.2) .2 Although the Taj Maria block was not the only decorative pattern block used in the 1950s and 1960s, it is a startling example of the vernacular appropriation of a high style form. This account begins with a history of the carport, then the development of the Taj Maria concrete block, and an explanation for the popularity of the form for carports. THE CARPORT With the boom in automobile ownership in the mid-twentieth century, where to store the automobile became an increasingly important problem. Its automobile was often the family's most prized possession, important enough to have a place of its own, off the street Fig. 1. Ranch House with Carport, Rockingham County, North Carolina. (Mary Pope Furr) 71 Fig. 2. Ranch House with Carport, Wake County, North Camlina. (Mary Pope Fun) and out of harm's way. The most logical solution to this problem was to put the car in a detached garage, a building type derived from the carriage houses of the preautomobile era.3 The format of a main house with detached garage remained common throughout the early twentieth century, particularly on comparatively deep but narrow city lots. While this remained a viable solution for those who had enough room and could afford an entirely separate structure, the character of Post War development made such separate structures less feasible for the small lots of suburbia.4 Home buyers began to expect even modest suburban houses to provide some sort of protection for their cars, and architects and builders struggled to incorporate attached garages into a variety of house styles. By the mid-1950s, as highways filled with ever more cars, and as people commuted from the suburbs, the garage door became an ubiquitous suburban accoutrement, eclipsing porticoes and front porches as the dominant feature on suburban facades. Although many architects, builders, and homeowners accepted the idea of an attached and fully enclosed garage, others sought alternative solutions to the problem. Frank Lloyd Wright, a vocal opponent of the idea of boarding cars in garages, designed carports for his Usonian houses of the 1930s. Wright argued that 72 Aruus the garage was, in effect, a barn- hardly a fitting home for such an important machine. He preferred the carport , a form with no clear antecedent, created explicitly to shelter automobiles instead of horses.5 Wright argued that all an automobile needed was "liberal overhead shelter and walls on two sides."6 Despite Wright's advocacy, the carport was slow to catch on in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, the open, inexpensive and flexible carport increasingly became an alternative to the garage. Additionally, between the 1940s and 1960s a variety of magazines and publications began to promote carports, particularly in relationship to the contemporary ranch house.7 Whatever its origins, in the 1950s and 1960s, architects , builders...