The house
The programme before the drawing
There is no building yet. There is a programme: what the house must do, in what order, and what it rules out.
We are not looking for a fine house in which to install a school. We are looking for a building able to do two things at once: shelter an organism around a courtyard, and lodge men who work.
THE WAGER
Two types, one house
Two old types each answer half the programme. The riad gives the organism: a courtyard, water, shade, rooms that take their air and their light from within and never from the street. The fondouk gives the work and the sleeping: a ground floor of workshops and stores, unequal cells opening onto a gallery, a single door and a doorkeeper.
The house needs both, and takes each where it belongs: the riad below, around the courtyard, for water, air and common life; the fondouk above, on the gallery, for the atelier and the sleeping.
This is no architect's compromise. It is the arrangement the medina has always given to houses where men work and lodge at once — and it is the first criterion in choosing the building.
THE USES
What the house must do
| Use | What it demands of the building |
|---|---|
| One atelier — leather, iron, wood | On the ground floor, in a single span, with its store, its water point and a service access that does not cross the courtyard. The forge fire demands its flue. |
| Sleeping | Unequal rooms opening onto the upper gallery, never onto a corridor. None identical to its neighbour, and none priced. |
| The table, the oratory, the parlour | A single table for all, a room for prayer, and a place where one receives without letting in. |
| The books | A room and a cupboard that locks. One asks for a book; the book is brought. |
| The body | The hammam and its hearth, the changing rooms, a sheltered court for physical discipline. |
| Water and air | The courtyard, the fountain, the channels, the garden. These are the organs of summer comfort, not a decoration. |
| The threshold | A single door onto the street, a bent entrance, and a lodge from which one sees who comes in. |
The order of the rooms is described in detail elsewhere. Organisation of the spaces →
WHO BUILDS
The order of building
The house is raised by established masters, under works supervision and according to the procedures an old building requires. The ṣāniʿ do not intervene there, since they train meanwhile in the workshops of the medina, and enter the house when it is finished.
The school's own building site comes after the opening, and never closes again: the outbuildings, then the garden, then the houses of the derb. Works modest enough for a mistake to be repaired, and real enough for it to count. The building site →
THE FIRE
The hammam is a machine
It is the only organ of the house that demands a permanent hearth, a chimney, a fuel store and a door onto the alley. The hearth stands outside the bath, backing onto the wall of the inner room; the gases first heat the water basin, then run beneath the paving in the chebka before leaving. The hammam is not placed wherever room is left over, but what fixes part of the plan, and the chebka claims a void beneath it that cannot be moved.
Where the chimney runs, where the fuel comes in, where the ash goes out, who keeps the fire, and with what: five questions that come before the zellij. The hammam →
Model after a medina hammam. An illustration, not a plan: the house does not exist yet.
WATER AND COURTYARD
Devices, not decoration
The courtyard is not an ornamental void, but the room that governs the temperature of all the rest. The cold air of the night settles there, the galleries keep it, the thick walls give back in the evening what they took by day, and running water sustains the evaporation.
The fountain at the centre, the salsabīl set against the garden wall, the channels: each piece of water has a function before it has a form. The patio →·Water →·Natural coolness →
WHAT IS RULED OUT
What the house will not be
A programme is read as much in its exclusions. No equal rooms and no price per room; no ornamental pool; no treatment room; no ground floor opening onto the street; no separate dining room for those who pay more.
The rule holds for what will have been built as well: a space that begins to serve the image or the guest more than the resident must be corrected or removed.
THE WALLS
Who owns the house
The house is intended to be owned by an endowment, in the manner of the ḥubus: neither sold, nor divided, nor appropriated by a private owner. What is put into it stays with its purpose.
Organisation of the spaces →·The building site →·Vernacular architecture →
الرِّياضُ لِأَهْلِهِ، لَا أَهْلُهُ لِلرِّياضِ
“The riad is for its own, not its own for the riad.”