The Slow Return of the Courtyard

The oldest trick for cooling a building is also among the simplest: wrap rooms around an open void and let the air do the work. The courtyard is older than the column, and it is quietly coming back.

In Seville, Marrakech and Hyderabad it never left. What is new is its return to the temperate city, where decades of sealed glass towers have produced buildings that cannot breathe without a power supply.

A courtyard is a low-technology answer to a high-technology problem. It moves air by temperature difference alone, shades its own walls, and offers — almost incidentally — the thing every dense block is starved of: a piece of sky that belongs to everyone who lives around it.

Across three continents, a generation of architects is relearning the lesson. The future of cooling may turn out to be very old indeed.