PRE-WEB ARCHIVES:
No. 28, Spring/Summer 1989
Desert Architecture
By Corky Poster
"...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 Nor them 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." |
Human settlement patterns have always been closely intertwined with the fundamental economic activities that they support. Thus in the prehistoric period when human beings were nourished by a hunter-gatherer economic system, the form of human settlement was appropriate to that economy: an arms-length migratory pattern aimed at establishing territories large enough to support a family or tribal grouping with the naturally occurring food supply. The less plentiful the food supply, the larger the territory needed to be. The pattern was migratory, moving with the growth seasons and the animal herds, and the house form corresponded to those needs. It was mobile, light, simple, and protective. A fundamental change in the economic system--the advent of the agricultural revolution, wherein early humans discovered that they could intervene in the reproductive cycle of edible plants and thus control and manage their food supply--brought a corresponding change to the human settlement pattern. No longer was an arms-length, migratory pattern desirable. Instead, a more sedentary, more permanent form emerged. As agriculture developed further, human groupings were able to produce a surplus of food, and from this single fact grew division of labor and ultimately towns and cities. |
Thumbnail link to image of courtyard house roofs, ~28K file. |
These changes occurred most rapidly in very specialized climatological areas. The first urban agricultural centers emerged in areas blessed with benign and year-round growing seasons combined with the ready availability of rivers for irrigation purposes. Major permanent concentrated populations arose, for example, in the Tigris/Euphrates region of ancient Mesopotamia, the desert coast of Peru at Chan-Chan, the Thar Desert crossed by the Indus River in what is now India, and Egypt of the Nile. In all these arid-region urbanized agricultural centers, the courtyard house emerged as the basic house form. Today, throughout the arid regions of the world, the courtyard house remains a sensible, satisfactory, and preferred solution. Schoenauer, in his informative book 6,000 Years of Housing, Volume 2, The Oriental Urban House, carefully documents the wide range of courtyard house solutions that emerged in such cities as Ur, Monenjo-Daro, Kahun, and Athens, which formed the essential prototype that spread ultimately from the Spain of the Moors on the west to the valley of the Yellow River on the east (1). With Columbus' voyages from Spain to the new world, the house form continued further west and joined and reinforced the indigenous form that had emerged independently five hundred years earlier, from Chaco Canyon in today's New Mexico to the desert coast of contemporary Peru and Chile. |
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. | |
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Courtyard houses provide an ideal prototype for desert communities. In the colder periods of the year the courtyard, if properly oriented, provides a source of sun at the heart of the house, not at its perimeter. By maximizing the number of habitable rooms that face the courtyard, the major portion of the house is afforded an adjacent sunny outdoor space. Even in the desert communities where nighttime winter temperatures reach freezing, the daytime temperatures are sufficiently moderate that this courtyard can become an active and usable living space. It provides a safe outdoor play area for young children and a safe outdoor sitting area for adults and the elderly. In the hot season of the year, the courtyard can serve the same purposes in the morning and evening and, while often hot in the sunny areas during the day, the walls provide a portion of shade on at least some part of the courtyard throughout the day. Overhead shading in the summer can be achieved through deciduous vines and trees or light partial coverings, for example, cloth, palm fronds, or open-weave mats. Courtyard housing has the additional attributes of providing easy and natural privacy, allowing for increased densities without negatively affecting the quality of life, and forming a limited oasis microclimate that can moderate climatic extremes and provide a manageable green space appropriate to limited water resources. Courtyard housing has economic implications in that it can produce better desert housing with significant cost savings. In the underdeveloped desert regions, the lack of availability of wood or steel products makes it difficult to develop spaces with a structural span of more than 3 m. By making the courtyard the large "room" of the house, one can provide a larger space without the material cost associated with that structural span. Thus a low-cost house could have a central courtyard "room" of 6 m without the associated cost. This same spatial attitude that creates courtyard houses extends to courtyard cities as well. Urban space, principally streets and plazas, maintains the same relationship to urban buildings and blocks that courtyards have to the rooms of the house, that is, approximately the same size and proportion. Thus outdoor space in a courtyard city is not conceived as an open rambling park but instead is viewed as a contained space with a specific length, width, and height. In the same way that a house is viewed as an interlocking composite of indoor and outdoor space (rooms and patios), the city itself is conceived of as an interlocking composite of indoor and outdoor space on the next larger scale (blocks of buildings and streets and plazas). By the clarity of its edge definition and its scale and proportion, streets and plazas become clearly defined urban spaces that maintain a human scale. What this spatial attitude ultimately requires, of course, is a relatively high-density, low-rise urban form: low-rise in order to freely integrate outdoor space into built space and high-density to properly define outdoor space at a human scale. Outdoor space, by its proximity to indoor space, gets intensive use and consequently earns the right to be designed with the same care as indoor space. The courtyard city becomes a honeycomb of carefully designed indoor and outdoor spaces, with a range in scale from the smallest private patio to the largest public space to accommodate the size and variety of human groupings and activities. A comparison of densities is interesting. Although we tend to associate only high-rise construction with high densities, a more careful study reveals that not to be the case. In the Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City), Le Corbusier recommends structures of 15 stories and projects a density of 1,000 persons per hectare (2). In the Organization of American States publication Normas Minimas de Urbanizacion y Servicios Publicos (Minimum Standards of Urban Design and Public Services), the Colombian architect German Samper Gnecco develops a low-rise, high-density prototype that also reaches a density of 1,000 persons per hectare but at one and two stories only (3). Peter Land, in his publication Economic Garden Houses, High-Density Development, develops a vast array of inventive low-rise, high-density schemes, each with extensive private outdoor patio space, which reach densities of up to 600 persons per hectare (4). These results are achieved at only one to two stories with auto parking adjacent to each unit. Latin America, which is closest in history and climate to the arid regions of the Sonoran Desert, has been developing some new and interesting examples of courtyard houses brought into the twentieth century. A few examples of the most recent and exciting work and research follow. PREVI (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda)-- Lima, Peru(Back to top) Chinchorro Housing--Arica, Chile(Back to top) German Samper Gnecco, INSCREDIAL, Revisita Escala, and Rogelio Salmona--Colombia(Back to top) Tucson Community Development/Design Center (Centro de Arquitectura para La Comunidad) |
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Corky Poster is an associate professor in the UA College of Architecture who is also in private practice. He specializes in housing and community design.
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