Palaces of the Ottoman era, the Golden age of Islamic civilization, bear witness to a prestigious know-how, drawing its rules from a way of life governed by the Islamic Sharia, the socio-cultural context of the Berber-Arab population and the climate-physical environment. The palace of Khdewedj El Amia is one of the majestic palaces located at the Casbah of Algiers and constitutes the subject of this article whose objective is to decode its genome in order to understand the social logic of a space inhabited and designed by a princess who lost her sight. Hence the name El Amia, which means blind in Arabic. The decoding of this building used the space syntax approach via a visibility graph analysis (VGA) performed by the Depthmap tool and a quantitative analysis of the graph justified by the Agraph tool. It is about taking into account the way in which vernacular architecture can stimulate the direct perception of space and participate in the construction of the user’s path. It was found that the palace is made up of two entities; one is of public order highlighting the resident/alien interface, and another intended for the private apartments, the harem of the princess, isolated from the outside world.
Open spaces in neighborhoods are children’s main living spaces, closely related to their daily activities. There is an increasing awareness that the physical form of the neighborhood plays a critical role in children’s activity, by offering opportunities for exploration and interaction. The aim of this paper is to explore the impact of the spatial configuration of buildings on children’s activity on the example of a residential area in the city of Oum El Bouaghi (Algeria) as the research object. The hypothesis of this work indicates that spatial configuration and the location of the buildings, in particular, the way in which the site is embedded are important variables in children’s outdoor activity. Based on this hypothesis, both quantitative and qualitative methods are used together through Space Syntax and Snapshot Observations. Findings indicate that the extent and character of children’s outdoor activities are greatly influenced by the physical characteristics of the neighborhood environment in residential areas through the degree of space enclosure interpreted by visibility and accessibility. By uncovering the impact of spatial configuration, this research offers an approach to designers for rethinking and considering new insights into managing and designing current and future spaces in light of children’s preferences and behavior patterns.
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