Treat a dead-end lane as the joint property of the houses that open on it: no one may open a new door into it, build over it or narrow it without the consent of all of them, and they may close its mouth with a gate.
Jurists distinguished the through-street, open to all, from the lane without an outlet: the darb of the Maghreb, the adarve of Spanish towns. Because only its residents use it, they alone decide what happens in it: a house may not open a new door into it or project a room over it unless the others agree. Many such lanes were closed with a door at night.
The effect on the town is a branching plan. A few public streets carry traffic between gates, mosque and market; from them short lanes turn and end, each a semi-private court shared by a handful of families. In Mughal Delhi the gated lane (kucha) and market court (katra) play the same part.
To turn a domed square into a long church, open two of its great arches into semidomes of the same radius, and open the semidomes in turn into smaller exedrae, so that the space expands by stages from the central dome.
Hagia Sophia: central square 31 m; two semidomes of radius ≈ 15.5 m; four exedrae; interior ≈ 31 × 70 m
Where the ground is flat and the water lies deep, raise it from wells by wheels into tanks and channels, and lay the garden out in regular, symmetrical plots round them, with walks, beds of flowers and trees in order.
Orient the prayer hall so that its principal wall, the qibla wall, stands square to the direction of Mecca, and mark the middle of that wall with a niche, the mihrab.
qibla wall ⟂ direction of the Kaaba; mihrab on the axis
Build the congregational mosque as an enclosed courtyard (sahn) with a covered prayer hall (haram) on its qibla side and shaded porticoes (riwaq) on the others.
Make the prayer hall of identical bays of columns and arcades, so that it can be enlarged by adding aisles or bays without changing its character.
hall = n aisles × m bays of one module
Place an iwan (a vaulted hall walled on three sides and open on the fourth) at the middle of each side of the courtyard, the one on the qibla side leading to a domed chamber before the mihrab.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The dead-end lane belongs to its houses”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/derb-closed-lane. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.