Building — 6 min —
The case for the courtyard
It is not nostalgia. A square of enclosed air does more thermal work than most of what has replaced it.
The courtyard house is usually defended on cultural grounds — privacy, the separation of guest from family, a garden you can be in without being seen. All of that is true and none of it is the strongest argument.
The strongest argument is thermal. A courtyard is a reservoir of cool air. Overnight it fills with the coldest air on the plot, because cold air sinks and the walls stop it draining away. In the morning the rooms around it draw on that reservoir, and in a climate with a twenty-degree daily swing — which is most of Afghanistan — that is enough to hold a house in the comfortable band until mid-afternoon without spending anything.
A villa on the same plot, set in the middle with garden all round, has no reservoir. Its walls are exposed on four sides and its rooms are heated from four sides. It needs mechanical cooling by eleven, and in a place where power is intermittent that means a generator, which means fuel, which means the running cost of the house is set by the shape of it.
None of this requires building in mud brick or copying a historic plan. It requires putting the open space in the middle rather than around the outside.
