Saturday, April 04, 2015

Cave-garages

In less than a generation an utterly new housing question has arisen—the housing of motor-cars. Original bungalow architecture never contemplated car-houses on the street frontage, and thousands of homes in New Zealand suburbs have had their frontal aspects utterly changed by the addition of motor-kennels to the floral attractions of the front garden. No one has yet drawn any cultural conclusions concerning this architectural and landscape innovation; but certain it is that such an addition in front of the bungalow was not part of the ideal home plan of thirty years ago. Perhaps society is not so much cultural as utilitarian; and the certainty that no consideration whatever will stand in the way of the housing of cars —whatever happens to other forms of housing—has caused the City Council to provide for twenty-odd garages in its latest concreted street wall, in the lower part of Sydney Street. These cave-garages may or may not be bomb-proof, and may or may not be gas-proof, but they at any rate do not stab the landscape. Criticism of the effect of twenty-odd garages on through traffic in the street is met by the statement that in that part of reconstructed Sydney Street there will be no through traffic at all.

Evening Post
 14 April 1939
Page 8


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