To cool your home without air conditioning, the medina of Tunis has already worked out the answer: a patio open to the sky, built to draw in air and light without exposing the house to the sun, and the moucharabieh (a pierced wooden screen) designed to let the breeze flow through while keeping out both the heat and prying eyes.
Why did medina houses close themselves off from the outside world?
What if that humming air conditioner were, in the end, nothing but an admission of architectural laziness?
In the medina of Tunis, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979, nothing is given away from the street. The façades stay plain and sealed, because climate, lifestyle and the natural surroundings all shaped a world hemmed in by walls, turned inward on itself, from the individual house right up to the city as a whole. What you find here is architecture built to protect, never to show off.
But this withdrawal is never total: there is always one opening left, the patio. By turning their gaze towards the sky rather than the street, the builders gave each house its own air and its own light, without ever exposing it to prying eyes or outside heat. In the medina, closing your walls never meant closing your home.
Did the moucharabieh ever do more than decorate?
People assume it is purely decorative, this lattice of turned wood that traces lace patterns across the windows of old houses. It is decorative, but not only that: the moucharabieh is first and foremost a pierced screen, made of turned wood or gypsum panels, common throughout traditional architecture across the Arab world, and designed to let air circulate. Its finely carved surface pierces the façade with a thousand tiny openings that invite the breeze in without letting in prying eyes or direct sunlight.
The word’s origin confirms it. Moucharabieh comes from an Arabic root meaning to drink, the same root that gave us syrup, sorbet and chorba: people used to drink in the shade of the moucharabieh, where the moving air kept the room cool. Long before it became an architect’s flourish, it was a tool for comfort, designed to ventilate before it was ever designed to please.
What can Matmata’s cave houses teach us?
Head south to Matmata, a village in the Gabès governorate, forty kilometres southwest of the city. The area is known for its troglodyte dwellings, dug straight into the hillside. Rather than building to fight the heat, people sink into the earth itself, which wraps around the house and keeps it shaded from the sun all day long.
This way of building is nothing new: it already existed in Matmata three thousand years ago. The Phoenicians adopted it, and the Romans later borrowed the same idea to build their summer apartments.
What if the solution came from somewhere else entirely: what does a bâdgir look like?
In Iran, this kind of architectural intelligence has a name: the bâdgir, the wind-catcher. It is a vertical shaft, rather like a tall chimney, cut with long slits that catch the faintest breath of wind and carry it down into the house. There is nothing electrical about it: just a shape that does the work for you, dreamt up long before the air conditioner was ever invented.
This approach has a technical name: bioclimatic architecture, the discipline of working with a site’s climate, geography and surroundings rather than fighting them. The bâdgir is just one version of it, and the lesson travels far beyond Iran: real coolness does not come out of a power socket, it is built into the walls.
What if that humming air conditioner were, in the end, nothing but an admission of architectural laziness? Yesterday’s builders had no cold button on a wall unit; they had the intelligence of wind, shade and stone, and it worked out just fine for them, thank you very much. At home, you don’t need to dig a patio or burrow into a hillside: close up during the day, open up at night, let your shutters and curtains do their job, and look for the draught that passes through rather than the one that just sits there. A jar of water, a few plants: that alone is enough to change the air. Add light colours to the walls, and why not commission a pretty pierced wood panel from a craftsperson, as a nod to the moucharabieh without giving up your twenty-first-century living room. Your thermostat will thank you, and so will your ancestors.
Also on La Sultane
The Interior Decorating Mistakes Turning Your Home into Chaos
Feng Shui at Home: Live Better, Live in Harmony
