The Courtyard House [1]: \"It...

The Courtyard House: "It should be noted that the courtyard house emerged as both an urban and rural prototype. Its key characteristic, however, is not its context but rather that it represents a fundamentally different conception of space from the Northern European house form. In the courtyard house, outdoor space is captured and included in the residential volume and ultimately becomes the heart of its morphology. This is an arid region concept that serves its climate well. In contrast to this, the Northern European prototype uses the house form to distinguish between indoor space and outdoor space and is fundamentally conceived as excluding and protecting the inhabitants from the often cruel and unforgiving climate. Thus a house or a building becomes an object in a field of outdoor space or a figure on a background. Probably the best example of this approach is a North American suburban home: a 40 x 40 ft object sitting in the midst of a 60 x 100 ft lot. The house self protectively turns in on itself. It represents a compact enclosure of what is indoors; everything else is outdoors. The courtyard house has a fundamentally different view of the relationship of indoor space to outdoor space. In the patio or court yard home, the house itself is an interlocking combination of indoor and outdoor spaces that together make up the house. More importantly, the character and scale of the outdoor space is not significantly different than that of the indoor space. In a sense, the house is made up of a variety of rooms, some with roofs and others without. The patios or courtyards are simply rooms without roofs."