The Prairie School architects of the late 19th and early 20th century were the great visionaries behind the architectural movement of integrating nature and landscape with a building or home. The idea that a home could have more open interior spaces, a visual connection between the indoors and outdoors, horizontal lines, and indigenous materials, made the original Prairie School architecture extremely popular for a brief time in the Midwest. Among these great architects were more notably Louis H. Sullivan, and later Walter Burley Griffin and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Walter Burley Griffin, also known as a great landscape architect, has been credited with the development of the L-shaped floor plan and the first use of reinforced concrete. But in 1903, it is his design of the William H. Emery House in Elmhurst, Illinois that gives him favor in this article. That home is considered to be one of the first to use a ‘carport.’ However, in the early 1900s it was called an Auto Space.
Many Prairie School architects used the auto space in their designs. The Sloan House, another Griffin design in Elmhurst, Illinois, as well as a residence at Lockwood Lake, Wisconsin in 1913 also feature the auto space. But it wasn’t until Frank Lloyd Wright started designing auto spaces in the mid 1930s for his Usonia homes that the term carport became popular jargon. Some architectural historians believe that the term carport stems from the visual connection between these streamlined residences and nautical imagery.
Many credit Frank Lloyd Wright for having coined the term carport. His initial use of the carport began with his first Usonia home, the Jacobs House built in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1936. Wright’s Usonia designs were usually small, single-story homes that were L-shaped to fit around a garden terrace on odd (and cheap) lots, environmentally conscious with native materials, little storage and no garage.
In describing the carport to Mr. Jacobs, Wright said “A car is not a horse, and it doesn’t need a barn. Cars are built well enough now so that they do not require elaborate shelter.”
After the First World War, many people in the Midwest shied away from the design values of the Prairie School architects and turned towards a more conservative style of home. However, Frank Lloyd Wright found prolonged success in the west, particularly placing his architectural signature on the California landscape. Today, the design belief behind the orginial ‘auto space’ continues to grab people’s attention and speaks of a more simplistic way of living.
