@jonny You're welcome. I don't think there is a precise book on the subject you seek, and it's going to be more a case of walking around the edges of that question, but also seeing whether there might be analogous spaces. For instance, I wondered whether driveways were linked to the rise of front yards in American culture. That American adjective there also made me wonder what the situation is outside of the USA and other Anglophone nations.

Where do driveways appear, and where do they not? Under what class situations of property? In what types of national setting? It's definitely worthy of a book!

@jonny yeah, you’ll probably need to cast your net wider.

I found this on suburban driveways. Probably too narrow: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/buildland.24.2.0085

@theeclecticdyslexic it returned basically a google scholar search with the terms i gave it, parsed by sentence, presented as an authoritative list of e.g. 3 per topic rather than an actual search index into hit matches, which is i guess not unhelpful but i already have plenty of tabs open and these are not necessarily better or more relevant, just presented with an air of like 50% accuracy statements about the relevance to my question

@jonny do you notice most architecture PR pieces only contain 1, 2 or 3 people in it- the person who commissioned the work and is picking up the bill, blueprint maker and the celebrity PR seller ?
Not the builders-brick layer, electrician, plumber or even the people who occupy, work in or live in the building.

Example: 7 most beautiful airports pictures has no people in it, apart from 1 - https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/the-most-beautiful-airport-terminals-in-the-world-including-two-in-the-us

the thing i was looking at was the page for the east wing of the white house because i saw someone saying "it had been there for decades before being destroyed" and i was like "i thought it was longer than that," and wikipedia tells a sort of three stage history: first there was just the side of the building, then they added stepped terraces with little collonade passages with washrooms, because i guess people would be arriving by horse/carriage or walking and would just be filthy. then they added a U shaped driveway that was mostly an entryway for dignitaries in 1902 shortly after the mass manufacture of cars began. then in WWII it ceased to be an entryway at all, sort of exactly the opposite, a bunker, to keep the out out rather than the in in.

and since i was also reading about some of the biblical wall fist shaking the other day it made me want to know more about the architectural/political history of approaches to buildings