"One Thousand Courtyards: Observations on the Courtyard as a Recurring Design Element," The Courtyard House by Nasser Rabbat (London: Ashgate)

Hashim Sarkis
One Thousand Courtyards: Observations on the Courtyard as a Recurring Design Element

The following observations are based on my investment in the use of courtyards in architectural design practice. These observations will be illustrated through a series of projects—built, un-built, and under construction—mainly located in the Eastern Mediterranean.. Although facilitated by climatic conditions, the recurrence of courtyards in my projects is primarily motivated by the way in which they work from inside out. This inversion of spatial hierarchies is a theme in my projects. Simply put, I believe that a gold mine of possibilities resides within the concept of the courtyard.
I am invested in the capacity of architecture to construct new worlds and encourage new forms of habitation that spill out of these worlds to inform the worlds around them. My view of architecture’s “constructivist” potential is inspired by the American philosopher Nelson Goodman, who argued that works of art, architecture included, are self-contained worlds that, if produced through a cumulative intensive logic, thicken to a level of complexity and rigor on a par with the reality of day-to-day life. The realism that we project onto the world, he argued, is a matter of habit. The internal configuration of a building can help us develop new habits of living.
I am also invested in the geographic potential of architecture, that is, the idea that each building could be part of another world. It is possible for a building to originate from a swift transition to an internal moment—a courtyard, for example—which would unwind to transform the edges of the outside world. This process can transgress the boundaries between building and context so that a new spatial relationship emerges like a new geography.
The functional dimension of architecture is central to this process but should not be employed as a program—a sequence of sequestered spaces that get reshuffled and recombined while remaining intact. Rather, it should be attentive to the notion of dwelling. As such, program is redefined according to habits of living that need to be interrogated and revised. Architecture should act as a framework that inspires ways of dwelling but does not dictate them. Formal articulations are applied with intensity along the edges of the spaces, leaving the outlined void (the courtyard) clear, allowing the edges to reverberate with possibilities of inhabitation. Possibilities for other forms of inhabitation are also maintained whenever one of the edges takes over the void. Courtyards embody this condition.
It may be restricting to refer to all manifestations of this condition as courtyards, and equally restricting to explain all courtyards in this manner. The word “courtyard” has itself acquired a very broad range of applications in architecture today. For example, we rarely nuance the different typologies of courtyard such as iwan, diwan, patio, terrace, dar, and light court. Nor does size restrict the definition of a courtyard; light wells, patios, and urban squares may all be considered courtyards. The resilience of courtyards and their recognizable character help to enrich our explorations into their formal possibilities.

Size
The examples I will refer to from my own work demonstrate that courtyards can be employed in different sizes: a light shaft in the interior of a room, as in the Assabil Library; an open space around which a house or institution is organized, as in the central courtyard of the Bab Tebbaneh School; and a space of relief in a dense urban area, as in the Edge competition project in Dubai. It is possible to relate all possible courtyard scales to each other via the figurative power of a void surrounded by a dense building and open to the sky, even if their function and formal behavior changes according to scale.
There may, however, be a limit to the elasticity of the courtyard’s size. However, the void may become too small or too big to be recognized as courtyard. This limit seems to be reached when the courtyard is no longer able to impart a sense of equality to the spaces that surround it. From within the courtyard, only the surfaces of the enclosure, including the sky and the ground, are important. The similarities across scales demonstrate the resilience of the form, surrounded by built space and sequestering the sky. Walter Gropius acknowledged this attribute of courtyards in the work of Jose Luis Sert, who referred to courtyards as patios. Scalar and proportional relations must be observed to maintain the identity of the courtyard.
The courtyard of the Assabil Public Library is much smaller than any of the courtyards in the Agricultural School in Mejdlaya, North Lebanon (a multifunctional building for the Rene Moawad Foundation). The courtyard in the Assabil Public Library project is also smaller than the courtyards in the Edge competition project—an entry for a 250,000 square meter, mixed-use development on the southern edge of the new Business Bay district in Dubai. Nonetheless, the courtyard in the Assabil Library clearly projects its identity in relation to the spaces that it centers, due to the intensity of the edges and the release it provides to the spaces that surround it.

Enclosure
Not all courtyards are equally enclosed, and not always on all four sides. As a formal test, it is helpful to assess the degree to which an overall enclosure can be suggested without closing off the whole space. In the Bademli House (a small summer house on the Aegean coast north of Izmir in Turkey), the building mass zigzags between olive trees, which help to complete the suggested enclosure of the courtyards. In the Issam Fares Institute project (a competition entry for a policy studies center on the American University of Beirut campus designed in collaboration with Anmahian-Winton Architects), the courtyard’s ground slips from underneath it giving the ground activity over to the campus while maintaining the enclosure within the realm of the institute. In the Housing for the Fishermen project, an 80-unit housing complex for the Al-Baqaa fishermen’s community on the outskirts of the city of Tyre, South Lebanon, the outline of the courtyard results from spinning a band of housing on itself and the energy of the spin. The space spins past the enclosure of the courtyard, leaks at the seams, and bends at the knuckles. It holds together through the identity of the courtyard.
In the Housing for the Fishermen project, the courtyard is split in half. One half is covered in plantings and the other half is paved. The space is never fully occupied by one function. In the Balloon Landing Park in Beirut, the balloon platform never settles on a specific edge but reverberates between the different enclosures, paths, walls, and partitions that intersect and sometimes overlap but never settle into a definitive outline. This condition is further developed where the ground planes of the project do not fully correspond, like a deck of cards before they are straightened after being shuffled.
Le Corbusier was always fascinated by what he referred to as the challenge of the void to architecture. The function of the courtyard remains open to possibilities. It suggests different forms of inhabitation that reverberate from the edges without imposing any of them fully. The void of the courtyard plays out of the different possibilities that it could be. It remains open to other options of dwelling, and simultaneity is the ultimate challenge.


Relationship to Context
Placing a courtyard inside a building usually implies turning the building inward and withdrawing it from its context. The courtyard house is directly associated with the less public city (this interpretation is often projected onto the prototypical/mythical Arab-Islamic city). It is often claimed that the courtyard sucks public life from the street. This viewpoint, however, does not acknowledge that public life could occur on the inside as well as the outside. When intensity is factored in, a narrow street could be as public as a wide street or square, and the courtyard can engender an accessible form of public life.

Outside In: In addition to the idea that public life cannot occur inside, another commonly held belief is that inside and outside are totally disconnected. Yet when carefully examined, the transition between the two realms makes up for much of the courtyard’s ability to withdraw. The orchestration of the transition from the outside world into the courtyard defines much of its character. The Bab Tebbaneh School was designed for the Rene Moawad Foundation, a non-governmental organization invested in the development of rural areas in Lebanon. The six-classroom facility is located in one of the poorest and densest communities in Tripoli, Lebanon. Here, the transition into the internal world of the school’s courtyard is almost instant. In the Agricultural Center, the courtyard spills out like a passageway. Only when one moves deep within does the courtyard turn in on itself. In the Housing for the Fisherman project, the street tightens into a bottleneck and then releases the space into a courtyard. A topological continuity is established between the two.
Inside Out: The spinning effect of the Housing for the Fishermen allows for the outer world and the inner world to transition into each other smoothly, maintaining the visual presence of one from the other. This reverse movement, from inside to outside can be understood in a similar manner and with similar effects. Even within the innermost parts of the courtyard, the porosity of the enclosure allows it to maintain full contact with the outside.

Internal Context: A courtyard effaces the context around it, yet recreates a context of its own by setting its internal elevations against each other. For example, in my Preschool and Community Center project (located in the middle of an olive orchard two parcels away from the Agricultural Center), each of the four internal elevations of the courtyard is so different from the other that the whole idea of the courtyard is put into suspension. In Bab Tebbaneh, the building creates its own varied skyline out of the light wells and wind catchers.

Thickness of the enclosure
Depth of mass is one of the practical reasons for including a courtyard in a plan. A courtyard may be included if the depth of the building is such that its perimeter is not close enough to a part of the interior that requires light. Conventionally speaking, the presence of a courtyard presumes a certain depth of plan.
The dispersal of courtyards in the Agricultural Center is based on this notion, whereby the courtyards are used consistently to break open deep spaces and whereby the breaks are used to connect the rooms they separate and the levels they break through. By the time all the courtyards are added up, it is unknown whether the mass of the building is a solid that has been perforated or a series of volumes assembled around open spaces.
An increasing demand for thinness in the footprint of buildings as a means to cross ventilation and natural light has generated greater use of courtyards to counter depth of mass. As a result in many projects, the building is no longer conceived as a pancake with the courtyard cutting through it but more as a thin frame that surrounds the figure of a courtyard. This quality is exaggerated in the Housing for the Fishermen project, the Balloon Landing Park in Beirut, and in the Bademli House project. As a result of this reduction of building mass in relation to the courtyard, the thinness of the frame in the Bademli house is subjected to compacting to further define the enclosure.

Degree of Cover
Covering a courtyard would seem to defeat its purpose because it obliterates its function as a light source and weakens its primacy and among other rooms. The possibility of being covered, however, confronts the courtyard in every plan. Eventually, some negotiations have to take place between the openness of the courtyard and the enclosure of the space around it, especially when the courtyard is the only connection between spaces.
The courtyards on the two levels in the Agricultural Center slip over each other, creating overlaps in which the upper courtyards partially cover the lower ones and allow for covered passages through them. The alumni clubhouse for the St. Joseph School in Cornet Chahwan, Lebanon is a long thin building comprising an enclosure floating over a sharply sloping terrain. The walls of the courtyards turn to become shading devices along the edges. In Dubai, all the courtyards are covered, looking into the main street void like iwans (covered halls with one side open). In the Preschool and Community Center (located in the middle of an olive orchard two parcels away from the Agricultural Center), the cover clarifies the geometry of the olive trees as the topography shifts beneath them.

Combinations of Courtyards
There is an assumed singularity associated with the idea of the courtyard in relation to the mass it centers. However, the possibility of multiplication exists. “Mat” building types, for example, have always been invested in the repetition of the courtyard as a connective order for the mass of a building or urban block. The courtyard as part of a larger regulatory order of courtyards has also guided many of modernism’s low-rise, high-density housing projects.
The Dubai courtyards are a result of creating a self-shading block system whereby a void is placed across each mass in elevation, creating a checkered pattern. The courtyards in the Mejdlaya-based Agricultural Center also follow a checkered layout, this time in the plan. In the alumni clubhouse for the St. Joseph School, the courtyards are placed in a serial manner, alternating with the meeting rooms and allowing for the existing vegetation to intersect with the building. This same system applies to the Preschool and Community Center in Mejdlaya, where the olive trees pierce into the plan creating small playgrounds for the classrooms.

Sequestering the Sky
A courtyard can be understood as a window to the sky. However, unlike the vertical window, it does not sequester a specific view or prescribe a particular orientation (eastern light or northern light). It carves a random chunk out of the sky in order to create a complete internal orientation. The courtyard eliminates the outside context, including the skyline, and establishes a vertical connection to the outside. Yet, this condition is not always played out in this (its purest) form.
In Dubai, the voids act as iwans toward the internal street but as windows toward the city. In the Agricultural Center, the unity that is lost as a result of the multiplication of courtyards is reestablished by inscribing a very strong horizontality across them, drawn from the surrounding olive groves. In the Bab Tebbaneh school a new skyline is created out of the arrangement of the skylights and wind catchers.

Relationship to the Ground
A courtyard could be understood as the sequestering of a piece of ground, a full appropriation of an exterior surface. It could also be understood as a window turned towards the ground. For example, one of the most canonical aspects of Le Corbusier’s The Monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, is the way it pulls the ground of the courtyard from underneath the convent and restores it to the sloping hillside and the landscape.
In the Issam Fares Institute policy studies center, the ground slips from underneath the building and the courtyard above is completely cantilevered with a tree going through it, but the ground is given over to the campus while the space above looks back down at the public zone. In the Agricultural Center, the spaces above belong to different programs, allowing for a visual connection between them but not letting them physically connect.
In the Bademli House and in the preschool and youth center, the ground is the provider of order through its topography and vegetation (the olive trees). In the Alumni Clubhouse, the form of the building follows the form of the ground in a thixotropic manner but never fully replicates it. The courtyards are effectively those moments where the interior of the building spills out onto the sloping ground.

Microclimate
The creation of a mild climate within a harsh climate is one of the most prevalent functional interpretations of a courtyard. The courtyard creates a microclimate that can be calibrated by seasonal shading, planting, water spraying, surface treatment and lighting.
In the Housing for the Fishermen project, for example, the courtyard is split between a paved and a planted area. During the summer, this creates a temperature differential that allows for better cross ventilation between the surrounding buildings. In the Bab Tebbaneh School, the courtyard is coupled with wind catchers as a way of heightening air circulation. In the Edge competition project, the many courtyards act as self-shading devices that allow for views to the outside. In Bab Tebbaneh, the courtyard cancels out the smelly and polluting car mechanic shops that surround the building, while the wind catchers provide for cleaner air.
Several new geographies emerge as a result of manipulating the courtyard’s attributes. The combination and recombination of its attributes allows for different ways of interpreting and transgressing the typology. Many of the projects described above stretch the type almost to its limit of elasticity. They do so by folding its attributes—themselves an inversion of exteriority— inside out, by questioning some of the inherited wisdoms associated with the courtyard such as the privacy that it imposes on architectural and urban conditions, its singularity as an organizing element in an architectural layout, its formal simplicity as a square, and the purity and completeness of its edges. Persistent among these new geographies is the idea that architecture’s primary element of composition is the void, not the object.