For forty years we stopped building the one room that made this city's houses work. The climate is making the case for bringing it back.
Walk through Basavanagudi or Malleshwaram and the older houses give the game away. Behind a modest street face there is almost always a court: a square of sky in the middle of the plan, a tulsi plant, a place where the house breathes. For about forty years we stopped building them. Plots got smaller, setbacks got tighter, and the room count on the brochure mattered more than the quality of the air. We think that was a mistake, and the climate is making the case for us.
What a court actually does
Bengaluru sits at about 900 metres, which is why the city was pleasant long before anyone could afford air-conditioning. A courtyard house uses that altitude. Warm air rises out of the open court and pulls cooler air through the rooms around it, so the house ventilates itself even when every window to the street is shut. In our Courtyard House on Sarjapur Road, measured on a May afternoon, the living room ran four to five degrees cooler than the outside air with no fans on.
The second thing a court does is light. Rooms lit from two sides, the street and the court, do not need lights on until dusk. The third is privacy. A house that opens inward can have large glass walls without a neighbour looking in, which is the only way large glass works on a 30 by 40 plot.
The objections
"We lose area." A court of three by three metres is 97 square feet. In a 2,400 square foot house that is four per cent, and the rooms around it feel larger because they borrow its light. The area is not lost; it is spent.
"Rain comes in." That is the point. A planted court with a drain to the sump turns the monsoon into a daily event you watch from the sofa rather than a problem you fix on the roof. Rainwater harvesting is mandatory on most new plots in the city anyway; a court makes it visible and useful.
"Mosquitoes." Standing water breeds them; moving water and gravel beds do not. Design the drain properly and keep the plants in the ground, not in saucers.
How we plan one
We start with the sun, not the plot lines. The court goes where it can face north or east, so that the deepest rooms get morning light and the afternoon sun hits a wall rather than a window. Service rooms, the stair and the car park take the west. Verandahs, not corridors, connect the rooms, so that circulation is also living space. And the court floor sits a step below the rooms, so that water, dust and leaves stay where they belong.
None of this is new. It is how this city built before it got in a hurry. We are just trying to remember.