Pedestrian ways

III. The court and courtyard Category: semipublic space The passage and the forecourt, discussed in earlier issues of the Technical Page, are movement spaces linking the public realm of the street with the semipublic realm of an interior entry space. The court and the courtyard are semipublic exterior spaces, used for movement but principally conceived as places in their own right. They are semipublic in that they are open to strangers, but on a conditional basis. Both the court and the courtyard are isolated from the street and are principally for the use of those who occupy the buildings. Clear understanding of the distinction between the court and the courtyard is made more difficult by the similarity of terms which in fact should not be interchangeable. More standardized and exact usage is to be encouraged, as it will lead to better control of design. • The court and its synonym, the quadrangle, are spaces loosely defined by multiple buildings. The space is permeable from the street system. • The courtyard and its synonym, the patio, are spaces closely defined by a continuous range of buildings, or even by a single building, around its edge. It is closed away from the streets. Though there are Precolumbian examples of both, the court/quadrangle and the courtyard/patio are basically European imports. The former, looser, arrangement entered from northern Europe by way of the English colonies, while the latter, more hermetic, one came from the Mediterranean through the Hispanic Southwest. the courtyard in America The fully realized, hermetic courtyard/patio remains rare in North America. It is found in a very few university campuses of the early 20th centuries (often built when institutional policy favored retreat from the surrounding city), and in some apartment buildings of Mediterranean Revival in southern California and Florida. On the other hand, the loosely defined court and quadrangle are found everywhere, especially in the common run of university campuses old and new. Indeed it has been argued that the American campus (meaning an extended version of the court/quadrangle-pattern) is the only original contribution of American site planning to the world. This claim is untrue, as the many dismal practices of sprawl are also originally American. Among those negative contributions is a version of the court/quadrangle — devolved from Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology to a plan strategy that barely defines spatial enclosure — that has dominated the ubiquitous suburban office parks of the last decades. Of the two types, the hermetic courtyard/patio has the greater unrealized promise. One of its virtues is to enable radically mixed uses. For example, the unsightly workshop, vulnerable child care center , and rowdy school may, when equipped with courtyards, be placed immediately next to other uses. And the patio house (explored by Mies in Chicago and Detroit), with its potential for security, could be useful in the rehabitation of urban sectors that otherwise cannot guarantee acceptable safety.