The courtyard is one of architecture's oldest technologies, and one of its least improved-upon.
This idea recurs across our work because it keeps proving itself under real conditions, not just in the studio. A courtyard doesn't ask a house to choose between privacy and light. That's the whole trick.
"A courtyard doesn't ask a house to choose between privacy and light. That's the whole trick."
We first noticed this while documenting a completed project long after handover — the kind of observation that only shows up once a building has been lived in for a while, not on the drawings.
What follows from this isn't a rule so much as a bias we now bring into every early design conversation: a default we have to actively argue ourselves out of, rather than one we have to remember to apply.