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buildings, Tadao Ando restricts contact with nature to the
experience of air, cold, rain, snow, and certain sounds (the
voices of birds, the rushing of the wind) as the essence of
outdoor-ness, thereby opening up the interior to the outside
as a courtyard. On the one hand, the courtyard is of course
an outdoor space; but a series of characteristics makes it
an interior one as well: an inner courtyard set at the mid-
dle of a house occupies a central position between the in-
ner rooms, and is nonetheless sheltered against prying eyes,
wind and the noise of the surrounding town. Suitable pro-
portions in cross-section endow it with > closure, its regular
form singles it out as a distinct spatial figure, and painstak-
ing design makes it a suitable place for the household com-
munity to gather (> gathering) together under open skies.
Related to the courtyard is the forecourt, which is essen-
tially an > intermediate space that forms a transition to a pub-
lic urban space. Related forms are the access yard, often built
into the > corner of a building, and the barracks yard, whose
dimensions makes it a borderline case in this context. As a
hortus conclusus, the garden courtyard combines traits of
courtyard and > garden, for example in the cloister. Common
to all of these forms is a degree of closure, and all convey –
despite their openness – a delimited interior zone. The public
> square, by contrast, is distinguished from the courtyard by
virtue of its location and its explicit status as a public space.
Yet existing between building and courtyard in a way
similar to that between architectural volumes and public
squares is a figure/ground relationship involving architectural
body and empty > space. On the one hand, interior and ex-
ternal spaces intersecting in the > space-body continuum. On
the other, the courtyard forms a link in the chain of exterior
spaces, whether in a > sequence of courtyards, such as the
Hackesche Höfe in Berlin, or through the > incorporation of
interlocking courtyards of various sizes, for example in the for-
bidden city in Beijing, where one has the peculiar experience
of exiting one courtyard only to find oneself inside the next.