Courtyard Houses (Page 3)

While courtyards bring nature within a building, they also moderate nature's extremes. At their best, courtyards can offer exquisite landscapes, worthy centres of attention and activity within a building. They offer both privacy and access to nature.

The courtyards can represent many things, an oasis in the desert of city streets, a fragment of nature, a centre of interest for the building, a concentration of light, sound and water, a life sustaining refuge of safety and privacy. In Islamic cultures, there can be a separation of domains within the house between male and female. Here the formal and informal courtyards are often connected by an indirect path.
Courtyards create a microclimate. Free from dust and heat courtyards are protected by external walls and verandahs or defined by rooms and act as light and air well in which cool night is trapped. The sunrays touch the courtyard in the afternoon, causing heated air to rise, setting up convection currents, resultant air flow ventilates the surrounding rooms, keeping them cool.

Plants are important to courtyard cooling as they provide shade. Compared to a deep courtyard, a shallow courtyard admits more sun in both summer and winter and radiates more easily to a cold night sky.

With the fading of the joint family, pressure on land, and mechanical means of temperature regulation, this form of residential is naturally falling into disuse.

Contemporary architects, however, incorporate courtyards when a semi controlled outdoor space is appropriate, although the glass covered, air conditioned "atrium' is seen more frequently these days.

The End.