Midsummer's intense sunlight and oppressive heat bring to mind an architectural invention that dates back thousands of years and is shared by many cultures around the world: the courtyard.
Courtyards are a common feature in homes and hotels I've seen in countries as diverse as Japan, Costa Rica and the United States, where they are typical of housing in Florida, Arizona and California. When serving as a Peace Corps volunteer architect in Tunisia, I visited arid but cool courtyards within traditional Tunisian dwellings. Later, in Italy, I admired the colonnaded atria of Pompeian villas. Granada, Spain, is graced with the intimate courtyards of the Alhambra, with quiet fountains and shady, arabesque-encrusted arcades that made it one of the world's most beautiful and habitable palaces.
The front lawn and rear yard that are typical of America's residential subdivisions are not courtyards. Fundamentally an outdoor room, a courtyard opens to the sky and is enclosed on most or all sides by wings of a building and garden walls. Whether in a modest dwelling or a monumental edifice, a courtyard often is designed to be one of a building's most important and impressive spaces.
Advertisem*nt
In Washington, houses built around courtyards are rare. More common here are courtyards in hotels, multifamily housing projects, schools, office buildings and institutional structures.
Well-designed courtyards can be functional, beautiful and environmental assets. They also generate their own pleasant microclimates. During much of the year in the world's warmer latitudes, appropriately designed and thoughtfully landscaped courtyards can remain comfortably cool.
Courtyards are made up of fairly straightforward architectural elements. Surrounding walls, shade trees, vegetation and structural features such as pergolas, trellises and sunscreens must block out the sun much of the day while allowing breezes through.
Organizing a building around a courtyard provides clear aesthetic benefits, including an added source of light, ventilation and views for interior spaces, which can have more windows and access to the outdoors than would be possible otherwise. That is particularly desirable when courtyards are designed as intimate gardens with seasonal flowers, ornamental shrubs and visiting birds.
Advertisem*nt
Rooms abutting courtyards also benefit from visual and acoustic privacy that is difficult to attain in rooms adjoining outdoor spaces exposed directly to neighboring properties or passersby.
A courtyard serves as a social space, an outdoor parlor, a meeting and activity center where people converse, dine, relax or play. And with well-designed lighting -- perhaps enhanced by the glow of candles -- courtyards can be as special at night as they are during daylight.
Why then aren't more buildings -- especially houses -- built with courtyards?
The most obvious answer is that home buyers here still want spacious front yards and fenced-in rear yards, a persistent cultural legacy. With the exception of the Southwest, where the cultural influence of Spain is strongly present, there never has been a tradition of courtyard building in this country.
Advertisem*nt
Zoning ordinances reinforce this legacy. After providing mandated front and rear setbacks on a typical subdivision lot, it's unlikely that enough space will remain to build a house with a courtyard, because such a house must be deeper than a conventional house.
There also are economic disincentives. For a given amount of floor space, building a house with a courtyard generally costs more. Additional roofing and perimeter walls must be constructed and maintained. More exterior surface means more heat loss, although good design can compensate for those disadvantages.
For those reasons, residential courtyards will not get more popular in the near future. But if we keep losing tree cover, if global warming continues unabated and if homeowners get tired of mowing their front lawns, courtyard housing may yet become an American tradition.
Roger K. Lewis is a practicing architect and a professor of architecture at the University of Maryland.
