Vernacular architecture

An architecture whose author is a tradition

There is a way of building that proceeds not from a theory but from a long accumulation of attempts, corrections and transmissions, and whose rules were fixed not in treatises but in the hands of those who applied them. It is called vernacular, from the Latin vernaculus, that which belongs to the house. It answers to climate, to geography and to whatever the immediate ground can supply, and that answer has been refined over a span no single project can match.

To say that it was made without constituted knowledge would be convenient, and wrong. The medinas of Morocco had rules governing party walls, rights of view and the discharge of water, a public watch over building, and a body of masters whose apprenticeship was long and graded. What it lacks is not science but signature: the proportions of a courtyard, the depth of a gallery, the height at which a room stays cool in July are known without anyone claiming to have invented them, because the knowledge belongs to the trade rather than to the man who practises it.

That knowledge can still be read, and the architects and restorers who have worked on the monuments of Fes over recent decades are the ones who have kept it legible. The house these pages describe claims to reinvent nothing: it proposes to enter this discipline and to accept its constraints.

What the climate dictates in detail — the courtyard and its draught, the malqaf, water and cast shade — is treated in the other pages of this section, to which the reader should turn. This page concerns the material, and what it demands of those who live in it.

Lime and zellige: two materials that age by letting themselves be taken up again.

The material of the place

The materials of this architecture come from a short radius: raw earth for the rammed walls, lime burnt in the kilns of the region, brick, cedar from the Middle Atlas, stone from nearby quarries. That choice, at first an economic necessity, has turned out to have a consequence we measure better today.

A wall of earth and lime ages by letting itself be repaired. It can be taken down without producing inert waste; the earth returns to the ground, the lime continues its slow carbonation, the timber is reused or feeds a hearth. Lime renders and tadelakt, porous and capillary, let the wall exchange vapour with the air and regulate humidity without condensation, unlike sealed coatings, which trap water in the thickness of the masonry and destroy it within a generation.

This is why a house in Fes can cross three centuries without ever having been rebuilt in one go. It has been taken up continuously, in small interventions, each generation replacing what the previous one had allowed to wear.

What this architecture requires

A building of earth, lime and wood is not restored every fifty years, but maintained every season. A render is made good before water reaches the rammed earth, a gutter is cleared before the storm, a cedar member is replaced before its load shifts elsewhere, a run of zellige is recut when it works loose. None of these operations is heavy, and none can wait long.

That requirement is the weakness of this architecture as much as its strength. Where craftsmen live nearby and know the house, upkeep costs little and the building lasts indefinitely. Where they are missing, the same house decays within twenty years, and it then takes a costly restoration campaign to recover what a few days a year would have prevented. Much of what is deplored in the medinas today follows from that rupture rather than from neglect or want of money.

From this comes the technical reason for Dar al-Hiraf, which is added to all the others and depends on no consideration of memory or heritage. A house built in this manner needs, in order to last, people who know how to take it up again and who live near enough to do so. Training masters of the trades and enabling them to remain in the quarter is the only maintenance suited to this kind of construction.

The upkeep of this architecture is made of short, frequent gestures, never of great campaigns.

The fabric, and the houses of the maalem

A medina does not stand by its monuments alone; it stands by the continuity of the fabric around them, and that continuity has a climatic function of its own. The density of the houses and the narrowness of the lanes mean that façades shelter one another from the sun, and that the temperature of the passages stays, at the height of summer, appreciably below that of wide streets. Every house that empties weakens its neighbours, thermally and structurally.

The houses intended for masters of the trades belong to this fabric and maintain it. They also restore to the medina an arrangement that contemporary planning has almost everywhere undone, the one that gathered into a single volume the place where a man lives and the place where he works, with the workshop at ground level and the dwelling above.

The offcuts of the workshops, untreated cedar, remains of lime and plaster, then return to the cycle of upkeep and heating instead of leaving it as waste, on the same principle that governs the furnace of the hammam.

The name of the Munya

In al-Andalus and the Maghreb, the word munya denoted the suburban estate where water, orchards and terraced gardens formed a place of coolness away from the city, joining a residence of quality to an irrigated agriculture. Its art lay in conducting water so that it served, in succession, pleasure, shade and cultivation.

Al-Munya, in this project, is a house adjoining the Riad and not an estate beyond the walls. What it keeps of the historical munya is the principle rather than the scale: water conducted with measure, planting tiered so that it shades what grows beneath it, and the coolness a walled garden can produce in a hot city. A courtyard planted and irrigated with intelligence obtains, over a few dozen square metres, what the munyas obtained over several hectares.

What this commits us to

Taking up this arrangement compels choices that cost more, in money and in time, than their modern equivalents. Lime renders are needed where cement would be quicker, cedar joinery where a section would be cheaper, thick masonry where applied insulation would be enough to pass inspection, and it must be accepted that the works will take as long as gestures that cannot be hurried.

Only on that condition will the house work as it should, and it is the same condition that makes the building site the first school. The young men who learn lime, plaster, wood and zellige here will learn them on the walls they will afterwards inhabit, and for which they will be responsible.