Timber-framed courtyard buildings: construction, transformation and conservation of Houses, Inns and Collective courtyard buildings

Abstract

The historic courtyard house type, with wooden galleries and perimeter rooms, is of great constructive interest, but complex analysis. In Madrid, numerous houses, inns, and collective courtyard buildings, of obligatory conservation (PGOUM, 1997), are not registered as new constructions (1494-1868). The discovery of a hidden inn (1737), with small rooms in the yard, the result of the expansion of existing construction, will place the transformation of the private houses of the suburbs into a new typology, the ‘collective courtyard building’ with rooms for rent. There will be an intermediate phase, the ‘transitional courtyard house’, with specific parameters. The constructive analysis of old projects with information on the plan (1737-1788), facades of countless preserved or demolished (1724-1905), and the planimetric survey of some singular courtyard houses, will determine a later repeated model called a ‘house of neighbours’ and recently ‘corrala’. It has structurally differentiable sectors, type dwellings on the façade and minimal around the courtyard, with a well, corridors and community latrines.