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maihudson:

“(…) in Europe men try to make their houses one with the landscape and its vegetation, either through gardens or through plate glass walls, so in desert countries men try to bring down the serenity and holiness of the sky into the house, and at the same time to shut out the desert with is blinding, suffocating sand and inhospitable demons. The mean of doing this is the courtyard. The house is a hollow square, turning blind, windowless walls to the outside, with all its rooms looking inwards into a courtyard from which only the sky can be seen. This courtyard becomes the owner’s private piece of sky.”
Hassan Fathy

Fathy’s Field House
New Gourna (Model Village), Egypt; 1946

via “An architecture for people: the complete works of Hassan Fathy”, Whitney Library of Design, New York (1997)