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.
This article attempts to study the impact of spatial intelligibility and the visual perception of the user on his habitat and focuses on how the inhabited space is experienced, practiced, and appropriated by its inhabitants through the study of concepts affecting the habitability and use of outdoor spaces in the residential environment based on the space syntax approach. The aim is to measure the degree of visibility, spatial and visual accessibility, connectivity, and integration between one space and another. Once the diagnosis is made, it becomes possible to intervene to improve the visual characteristics of the urban fabric and landscape, towards a better fabric of the city. The results show that the living practices and the ways that the inhabitants appropriate and use the space are intimately linked to the use of visibility by the inhabitants according to the integration of the space in question, its intelligibility, permeability, and its accessibility. Ultimately, the visual perception of the landscape image of the residential environment and the use of space are too important and closely related parameters, they affect each other and are shaped mainly by the physical environment in which the resident lives.
Keywords: Habitability, residential environment, enclosure, space syntax
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.