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
Rules · Cities · Use · Materials
Houses of the nobles and of the people
Build the houses of the great round courts and gardens, with pools and fountains, rooms below ground for the heat of the day and terraces for the nights; the ordinary houses crowd behind the streets, many of them of mud and thatch.
Bernier found the houses of the Mughal nobility well suited to the climate: set in courts and gardens, cooled by water and by tahkhana (underground rooms), with open halls, terraces and screens of scented grass wetted against the hot wind. The merchants’ havelis behind the bazaars were smaller versions round a single court, with a gateway, projecting balconies (jharokha) and eaves (chhajja) on the street.
Most of the population, he observes, lived in houses of mud and thatch, which caught fire every summer; he regretted that Delhi lacked the middle rank of good houses that filled the streets of Paris.
Related rules
Build the tower for the call to prayer in the form of the regional tradition: square and stepped in the Maghreb and Spain, cylindrical and tapering in Iran and Central Asia, needle-like and polygonal in the Ottoman lands.
Lay out the garden as a walled square divided into four by raised walks with water channels on the two axes, and divide each quarter again.
1 → 4 → 16 beds; water on the axes
Where people disagree about the width of a public road, make it seven cubits, and let no one build out into it; lanes that serve only the houses on them may be narrower.
public road ≥ 7 cubits (≈ 3.5 m)
Build as you will on your own land, provided you do your neighbour no harm: open no window, door or roof terrace that looks into his house or court, and do not set your door opposite his across a lane.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Houses of the nobles and of the people”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/haveli-bernier. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.