Authors: Ar. Sameer Sharma, Khushi Gupta
Abstract: The courtyard has traditionally played the role of climate mediator, social interaction facilitator, and spatial hierarchy structure in Indian built environments. However, this ancient typology has been carefully sidelined in mainstream Indian urban housing in the last 50 years despite its demonstrated environmental and social advantages. The present paper follows a socio-spatial path of the courtyard in Indian architecture in three climatic regions, such as hot-dry, warm-humid and temperate. The study, through the comparative analysis of the traditional precedents, patterns of decline documented, and the current reinterpretations, demonstrates that the loss of the courtyard is due to the overlapping forces: the floor area ratio regulations that punish the open-to-sky spaces, the economic pressures that prefer to maximize the built area, the ideological hegemony of the modernist planning models, and changing household patterns. Still, as the paper also reveals, the underlying principles of the courtyard, which include shallow plans, transitional spaces, hierarchical organization, and climate-responsive geometry are actively being reclaimed and modified by modern practice. Other projects such as House of Secret Gardens (Ahmedabad), Narsighar House (Nakhomah), House of Voids (Vijayawada), Pirouette House (Thiruvananthapuram), House of Memories (Karnataka), and The Earth House (Mukteshwar) represent various approaches to the re-use of courtyard logic. The paper contends that the courtyard is not a nostalgic artefact but a resistant, flexible spatial tool whose logic is urgently needed to tackle the twin challenges of increasing urban density and the accelerating climate change. At the end of the paper, there are design principles and regulatory recommendations on how to integrate courtyard strategies into the future urban development.
