Howard Davis/Comparisons among Different Buildings
Architectural Facts in Search of a Language
Form Language Symposium - Dresden, June 2001
--Continued--
Comparisons among Different Buildings
So far I have used the example of the simple courtyard house to hint at different methods of analysis and representation.
What I would like to do now is introduce three buildings in addition to the Tunis house, all of which may be loosely categorized within the courtyard type, and all probably related to the ancient Roman house, that will provide the material for analysis in the main part of this paper. These examples present different issues of organization and space, and comparison among various groups of them will help me to explain the positive and negative aspects of each method of analysis.
First is the simple courtyard house itself.
Second is a related building, in Cairo. It is the Bayt Suhaymi, a well-known merchant’s house from the 18th century. It too has a main courtyard, and an indirect entrance from the street. It also has an open porch called the taktaboosh, between the courtyard and a rear garden, and a three story, elaborately finished receiving hall off the courtyard, called the qa’a. The indirect entry in both the Cairo house and the Tunisian house is a typological transformation of the fauces in the Roman house. The taktaboosh is a transformation of the tablinum in Roman house.
Third is a courtyard house several hundred miles south of the Cairo merchant’s house, a building that was documented before the construction of the Aswan dam and probably does not exist any more. This is a Nubian house, belonging to a people who were influenced both by the Islamic cultures to the north and the African cultures to the south. In this house the courtyard takes up a larger percentage of the house area than the urban houses we have already looked at. These houses are usually oriented the same way relative to the Nile, they have shaded places for water on the south side of the courtyard, and a special bridal hall for newly married couples. They also had a tradition of being elaborately painted on the outside. In these buildings it is often possible to see through to the courtyard from the outside, and it may be that the much lower density of the Nubian village obviated the need for the courtyard to be hidden. But even here, we may compare the covered loggia with the taktaboosh of the Cairo house.
And fourth is a courtyard house in Mexico, which may be related to the other houses through its own typological ancestors in Spain. Its courtyard is entered through a passage known as the zaguan, similar to the fauces, and has all of its rooms – more public rooms including the estancia which is a living room and comedor which is a bedroom, private bedrooms as well as service rooms – around the courtyard.
I would now like to make various comparisons among these houses which point up the positive and negative features of the various methods of analysis.
Privacy and Function
Let me begin with a comparison of the Mexican house and the Nubian house, from the point of view of issues of privacy.
Although the houses are both courtyard buildings, and share the typological idea that the courtyard is both for circulation and other uses, and also share an entrance room in between the outside and the courtyard, there are many dissimilarities in form. The Mexican courtyard is almost square with the suggestion of an axis of symmetry entering the courtyard from the zaguan. The Nubian courtyard is much more rectangular with no overall symmetry. The Mexican house is one room deep on four sides of the courtyard; the Nubian house is two rooms deep on two sides of the courtyard, one room deep on a third side, and has only a wall on the fourth side. Although they are both clearly members of the courtyard typology, they are formally very different.
But a comparison of the adjacency graphs shows some interesting similarities. First of all the courtyards are each approximately the same number of steps in from the outside – either 3 or 4. Second, the bridal hall in the Nubian house and the parent’s bedroom in the Mexican are the same number of steps in from the outside – 5 – and are in each case at the deepest level of rooms for human habitation in the plan. And finally, in each case, at least some of the stables are at the deepest or next-to-deepest levels in the plan – no doubt to give protection to valuable animals.
There are several interesting things about the Mexican house. One is that not all the bedrooms are at the same depth inside the plan. In fact, the bedroom in the corner may be the bedroom of the parents – one can see a similar relationship in other Mexican houses. Another is that the kitchen and service rooms are quite deep into the house and this accords even with what we know about more modern houses in Latin America.
Now I do not want to claim that there is a cultural connection that is causing the correspondence in these privacy relationships between the Mexican house and the Nubian house. But what is interesting here is that we have found a method of analysis that can uncover facts that are not apparent with a casual reading of the plan. Of course, a careful reading of the plan alone will yield the insights we get from the adjacency graph. But that is just what the adjacency graph is – a way of reading the plan that abstracts certain of its characteristics. As we have already seen, in the case of much more complex plans, this turns out to be critical.
What has not yet entered very much into this discussion of privacy relationships is use and the function of rooms. Neither the plan analysis nor the adjacency graphs tells us very much about use.
In the case of the Mexican house, the public rooms – the estancia and the comedor, along with the shops – are on the right as you enter, and the bedrooms are on the left. The estancia is also the biggest room and has two pairs of doors, but that doesn’t matter in a space syntax analysis. We have a hint at the importance of this side of the courtyard when we look at the paving pattern, and the size of the estancia – but only a hint.
And it is with these issues, only hinted at with the plan analysis and hardly dealt with by the adjacency graph, that I would suggest that a graphic representation of Alexander’s patterns might be helpful.
The two houses we are considering here, both incorporate the idea of the intimacy gradient, but in different ways, which show that the patterns have different cultural manifestations. As with the typological approach, the way to see these differences may be graphical. In the Mexican house, the existence of the continuous paving from the zaguan to the estancia and comedor suggest that path for the visitor, and make that side of the house seem more public, thus subtly indicating an intimacy gradient which puts the bedrooms deeper into the house, even though they are quite close to the front of the house.
In the Nubian house, there is actually something quite similar going on, where the visitor entering the main courtyard is drawn toward the loggia and away from the wall enclosing the small courtyard. In addition, the door leading to the private courtyard is not even visible from the main entrance to the house, reinforcing the increased privacy of that realm of the house. The private courtyard and the large loggia are at exactly the same depth in the plan, but the way the building is actually made gives them quite a different status in the intimacy gradient.
So the various analyses are saying slightly different things. They are not inconsistent with each other, but each one is emphasizing something that the other is not.
If we look at what Hillier calls "depth", and we look at what Alexander calls the "INTIMACY GRADIENT," and we look at the subtleties in the plans, we see slightly different aspects of just how the architectural space of the buildings are arranged relative to their main entrances.
