Every generation of young people has to fight fascism. For mine, it was the overt fascism of the Nazis and their allies. For theirs, in relative peace time, it is the covert fascism of the square world. Usually this fight is lost, because young people fail to root out the seeds of fascism within themselves. -- Robert Filliou

THE CLOSET

Any house is a far too complicated, clumsy, fussy, mechanical counterfeit of the human body. Electric wiring for a nervous system, plumbing for bowels, heating system and fireplaces for arteries and heart, and windows for eyes, nose) and lungs generally. The structure of the house, too, is a kind of cellular tissue stuck full of bones, complex now, as the confusion of bedlam and all beside. The whole interior is a kind of stomach that attempts to digest objects—objects, objets d'art maybe, but objects always. There the affected affliction sits ever hungry—for ever more objects—or plethoric with over plenty. The whole life of the average house, it seems, is a sort of indigestion. A body in ill repair, suffering indisposition—constant tinkering and doctoring to keep alive. It is a marvel we its infestors do not go insane in it and with it. Perhaps it is a form of insanity we have put into it. 

[Fank Lloyd] Wright wrote this the same year he finished the construction of the Robie House, in his essay "The Cardboard House." It was another stab in the age-old battle between architect and housewife. Wright attacked the need for dark closet spaces. For him, the home should not be a junkyard; it should avoid having any poorly ventilated or dark rooms "to pack things out of sight." This cleansing prescription that Wright carried out in the Robie House and the rest of his Prairie homes was the basis of the modernist desire toward abstraction and minimalism: a life without objects. Without closet spaces, the home and the housewife lost the nooks and crannies where the storage of disused objects could take place. Closets contain secrets, and a home bereft of them meant these were left exposed. Closets can act as portals to enter small private worlds of supplies or excess. Previously, closets would have hidden provisions for the family, from bed linens or clothing to serving objects, stores for the winter; without closets there would be overflow in the home. If before the rural home was a self-sustained unit like a farmhouse where the production of clothes to the upkeep of animals happened within its walls, with the introduction of the garage the suburban home became autonomous from its surroundings and dependent on the car. The home became a repository and display of a family's consumption. The introduction of the car into daily life accelerated the speed of consumption. Wright's effort toward removing objects was in vain. The Robies, in need of even more closet space than they had before, started using a corner of their oversized garage. Decades later, once the garage had evolved to be an appendage to almost every suburban American home, the space started performing as the biggest storage room in the house. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the garage became the de facto space of the hoarder, the American consumer's preferred landfill. From old Legos, fishing rods, and ladders, to bikes, flotation devices, and old family albums anything and everything that could be saved for later found a home there. This devouring and collecting of goods hidden behind the garage door evicted the car and replaced it with cardboard boxes and containers holding mounds of forgotten household objects. As Wright rid the home of interior closet spaces, the home then spat out the refuse for which there was no allotted space one step closer to the street—into the garage.

-- Olivia Erlanger and Luis Ortega Govela, Garage