Streetscapes: Once-lowly garages are the new great rooms of the Twin Cities

If you're short on space or looking for some extra income, look no further than the garage.

Although the most prominent part of the postwar single-family home, garages receive little attention. And although a pervasive part of our built environment, they also get no respect.

Meanwhile, if this year's Parade of Homes is any indication, garages keep getting bigger. More than 80 percent of the homes on parade this year had three-car garages and because lots have grown smaller, most of these car hangars now face the street and represent the largest part of a home's facade.

To see what I'm driving at, let's look at the history of these lowly lockers of our stuff. French for "automobile stable," the very word garage tells us a lot about where they came from: They replaced horse stables that once sheltered the main mode of transportation in the 19th century. People did not want to live too close to those sometimes smelly stables, so such structures typically stood at the back of the lot, away from the house and facing an alley, if there was one.

When cars came into widespread use in the second decade of the 20th century, they replaced the horses in the stable with mechanical horsepower. But because of the fear of fire or explosion from gasoline engines, the first garages remained separate from the house, at the back of the backyard.

That didn't last long. By the early 1940s, as families overcame their fear of fossil fuels and began to recover from the Great Depression, garages started to gain their place as part of the home. Garages still remained back from the street and often faced sideways so that only the immediate next-door neighbor could get a peek at their contents: the tools, bikes and lawn gear that tend to accumulate in our car caves.

After World War II, modesty gave way to modernity and garages started to come into their own. The truly liberated households got rid of the garage altogether and went for the carport, a word right out of "The Jetsons" that captures the Space Age obsessions of the postwar period.

But most people didn't want that much exposure, so the garage remained an increasingly large room in most homes. In 1960, the garage took up 45 percent of the space in the average house. A third of the new houses in the Midwest now have three-car garages, compared with 17 percent nationally, making garages the single largest space that most people own.

Garages have also grown in number. By some estimates, there now exists more than one garage for every car made in the world last year, with roughly 80 percent of U.S. homes having a garage, attached or not.

Garages also have grown in the diversity of roles they play in our lives. More than 70 percent of homeowners report using the garage as the main entry to their house, and 40 percent say they use the garage as play space for kids, to practice music and for entrepreneurs to produce the next big thing, as the founders of Apple, Mattel and Google once did.

Which brings us back to where we began. Garages have become a place where families find extra space and friends follow their dreams, and that will likely become true for most of us in the future.

Just as we traded horses for horsepower a century ago as the stable became the garage, most of us will trade in driving for driverless cars within a decade or so. And with that will go the need for most of us to store automobiles.

Looked at another way, most homeowners will gain anywhere from a fifth to as much as half again more space in their houses. For what? An accessory dwelling unit for an aging parent or a returning child, an office for the nearly quarter of the employees and self-employed who now work out of the house, a production space for the half of the small businesses that make their products at home — the list goes on.

What will we call these spaces once they no longer serve as automobile stables? Instead of garage, let me suggest gratuit, the French word for "free."

Thomas Fisher is a professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota.