shift in focus

“While no single element overpowers other features in a traditional home, the front entrance is a focal point, conceived as an integral part of an entry sequence that begins at the street . . . Over the course of this century, the American home, like other aspects of our lives, has increasingly been designed around the requirements of the automobile. The garage has gravitated from a discreet position behind the traditional home to a position of architectural prominence at the front of the conventional home."
-James Constantine and J. Carson Looney, Traditional Home Design: Volume II, p. 4

Perhaps the most obvious technological advance that has changed the structure of American neighborhoods is the automobile, homes and communities have increasingly been designed to accommodate an automotive culture to the point that sidewalks have started to disappear and garages have replaced porches as the dominant feature at the front of homes (Constantine and Looney 3-5). In Alan Thein Durning’s book This Place on Earth, quotes Meeky Blizzard, an investigator for a local organization in Portland that looks at alternative development, in a discussion they had about a new suburban development. “It is a street of brand-new houses, or, more precisely, of brand-new garages. From her vantage point, she can see the driveways spreading out from the street and the double garage doors lining up toward the horizon. ‘Can you see any front doors or porches?’ None are visible. ‘For all you know, cars live here. Snout-houses is what a friend of mine calls them. The only way to figure out which one is yours is to go down the street pressing your garage door opener.’ Front porches, according to Meeky, are built on the assumption that people will be arriving on foot. They are superfluous here because no one could possibly arrive on foot. You can hardly even leave this subdivision without an automobile (108).

               older neighborhood: sidewalk, buffer strip,                      newer neighborhood: no sidewalk, large driveway
            walkway to porch (prominant feature), separate                    leading up to large garage (prominant feature),
               garage with driveway on the side of house                               walkway from driveway to front door

I immediately identified with the observations in Durning's book as I walked through the different neighborhoods of Northfield. The first and most obvious difference I observed was a shift from porches to larger and larger garages as the main architectural element on the front of homes. I feel that this difference also changed many other components of the community. For example, if homes in the older neighborhoods had garages they were often a separate building located behind the house, with either back alley access or a small driveway to the side of the house. In these neighborhoods there were many parked cars lining the streets providing a buffer between sidewalk and traffic.

Car buffer in older Northfield Neighborhood (Winona Street)

There were also walkways from the sidewalk to the front door, which was often located behind a porch. In the more modern developments the garages were not only part of the house, but they appear to take up a majority of the façade of the house facing the street. Leading up to these garages are large cement driveways, the front door is then accessed from a walkway that extends from the driveway rather than from the street. I was shocked to find that many of the newest developments there were a significant lack of sidewalks. In these neighborhoods lawns extended right out to the curb where the street then starts. Few cars park on the street due to the fact that most of them have a place within the two to three-car garages. This arrangement gives the older neighborhoods a much more pedestrian-friendly feel, in that there are sidewalks and a strip of grass and often trees, in addition to cars parked along the curb, providing a buffer between traffic and peoples yards. Walkways to front doors that extend from the sidewalk promote walking from house to house, whereas walkways that extend from a driveway promote vehicular travel.