Architecture
The riad as a climatic, social and spiritual device. Patio, rooms, workshops, hammam, garden, water and air — an inhabited house, not a décor.
This section describes the house — not in order to visit it, but in order to understand it. Nothing here is decorative: the courtyard governs the temperature of everything else, the water governs the courtyard, the threshold governs who comes in. Every device has a function before it has a form, and that is what distinguishes an old house from a décor that imitates one.
Four ways in: the matter and the crafts; the programme and the works; the order of the rooms; the passive climatic devices.
THE HOUSE
The threshold, the workshops, the patio, the hammam and the khizāna.
Materials
Zellige
Geometry, cutting, setting. The interlace as a language of unity.
Plaster and stucco
Muqarnas, relief, light filtered by worked gypsum.
Wood and stone
Cedar, noble materials worked by hand.
The programme
What the house must do before it is drawn, the manner of building it belongs to, and the order of the works.
The house
The programme before the drawing: what the house must do, and what it excludes.
Floor areas
The programme in square metres, room by room, at the opening and at full establishment.
Vernacular architecture
A way of building that needs, in order to last, those who possess its art.
The building site
Who restores the house, in what order, and where the first intake is trained.
The order of the places
The rooms, one by one, in the order in which life uses them.
Organisation of the spaces
The order of the rooms: the nucleus, sleeping, the body, knowledge, the threshold.
Threshold and rooms
Driba, parlours, dormitory — what the house shows and what it keeps.
Patio
Inner courtyard, fountain, reflection of the sky — the silent heart of the house.
Garden
Chahār Bāgh, secret garden, kitchen garden — an ordered and productive space.
Al-Khizana
The locked deposit of the volumes. One asks for a book; one does not help oneself.
Hammam
The farnatchi, the chebka, the three rooms — and two gestures, nothing more.
The devices
Water, air and mass — how the house tempers itself without machines.
Water
Fountains, rills, salsabīl — water as a principle of order.
Natural coolness
The patio as an air chimney. No mechanical air-conditioning.
The warmth of winter
Mass rather than air, wool before fire. No flame where men sleep.
The words of this page are in the common glossary; the works cited in the sources; the sister house is Al-Funduq aṣ-Ṣiqillī.