Lessons of the Alhambra: Architecture, Environment, Culture

Abstract

With its powerful sense of place and intricate network of buildings with pleasure and vegetable gardens and water channels, the palace city of the Alhambra is one of the most sophisticated exemplars of Islamic architecture and also an extraordinary model of sustainable architecture linked to an equally extraordinary material and symbolic culture. It is a model from which lessons may still be learned, from building in keeping with context and an ingenious treatment of water resources through to the use of a limited but effective range of elements, along with the deployment of environmental types and composition strategies based on organization by strata, porosity, filters, depths, the use of inhabited spaces as thermodynamic conduits, and a shrewd combination of thermal inertia with natural ventilation.