The Building Culture of Northern Nigeria.

When I visited Kaduna for eye check-up with my parents at the age of 11 (I haven’t been there since then), I can still picture the house we stayed in.

I remember the large living room and kitchen.

I remember the closed courtyard. It’s an open-air space at the centre of a building. Access to a closed courtyard is from the interiors.

According to Wikipedia, it is a circumscribed area, often surrounded by a building or complex, that is open to the sky.

I remember the garden, the space for hanging clothes, the workshop for a lot of food processing stuff.

Yea. It was a large family and they processed their own pap and Tuwo shinkafa.

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I remember this house we were staying in was in a federal or state staff quarters (I can’t remember which one it was again).

Our host was in the process of relocating to their own property and when we got to the new house, it was basically same layout with the courtyard (only larger).

The courtyard was new and green with same facilities for processing foods and sit-out areas.

The garden was beautiful. I remember it. Such a cool place.

That’s the building culture of Northern Nigeria.

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In Eastern Nigeria here, I’m yet to see it in our residential buildings or even our own building culture.

Our residential buildings look bulky, nothing soft about it.

With our estate 450sqm plots, we can’t achieve that. There is a minimum space requirement for an effective courtyard.

Courtyards are for maintaining internal thermal comfort and conditions of a building as well as holding spaces that are personal and private.

You can have your tomatoes/pepper/curry/vegetable garden within without the fear of stray goats and chickens destroying your mini farm.

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Be mindful of the drainage system for your closed courtyard.

For open courtyards, surface water run-off is easy to handle.

Oh! And there was zoning within the building layout. The part of the house we were staying in doesn’t allow direct access to the hosts.

The Living room, dining, kitchen and courtyard were the general spaces.

Tell us. Do you live in a residential building with a closed courtyard?

Yours in building design solutions.