The old quarter of Sana'a The following is an extract from "Yemen and its People - An Information Pack" published in 1975 by the Catholic Institute for International Relations, and distributed to schools and churches. Yemen, untroubled for centuries by foreign attention, has devoted to its cities and buildings the experience of over two and a half thousand years of uninterrupted urban living. In a country with such diversity of climate and landscape, there is enormous variation between buildings of different regions - yet whatever these individual styles and traditions, there are qualities, distinctively Yemeni, which will be seen throughout the country.   In the old quarter of Sana'a, these traditions and qualities can be seen at their best. This cluttered and chaotic old city is, one imagines, knowable only to those who discovered and explored its confused ways during childhood. Houses here are enormous - often seven or eight storeys - tall extravagantly decorated towers, crowding one another into the already-narrow alleys. Click any picture for larger version Like the crowd in the souk, it seems that each stays erect only through the ill-mannered pressure of its neighbours. The activity in the streets, like the form of the city itself, hides its pattern well from the stranger. Souks and watering-places, children and merchants, minarets and tea-shops - all compete noisily for attention. These small busy streets open out from time to time into courtyards or piazzas, or, with surprising suddenness, into green and spacious gardens through which the city seems to gasp for air. A house, perhaps adjoined by a small yard, will use its lower levels - windowless store rooms - to lift the living quarters above the smells and noise of the streets, providing a secure barrier against intruders. The kitchen may sit in the yard, clear of the house, or be incorporated in the building's first or second storey, hidden from the men of the house and their guests. Toilets - often simply a channel or hole in the stone floor - drain into a pit in the yard, or directly into the street. Water is drawn from a well and carried by the women to the kitchen, or by pump to a storage tank on the roof. The house rises, through its narrow steep staircase and unlit passages, to the living quarters. This warren of rooms - sometimes as many as sixty in all - confuses the visitor with its changes in level and direction, with corridors and doors inexplicably blocked off where impromptu addition and alteration have taken place. The living rooms are largely undifferentiated from one another, their use depending on the need of the moment or the taste of the householder. The most splendid of the rooms, high in the house, is used as the 'muffrage' - a place for meeting friends, talking, smoking and chewing 'qat'. Like all other rooms, the muffrage's ceiling and walls are whitewashed, but here the plaster may be carved in delicate patterns around the doors and windows. In the more devout households the carvings may spell out some suitable passage from the Qoran, forming friezes or wall-panels in Arabic script. The windows themselves, surrounding all but the north-facing wall of the muffrage, are topped with large semi-circular openings, holding screens of plaster tracery with infilling coloured glass. In this light-filled room the windows reach down close to the floor, allowing guests, seated on floor-cushions to overlook the surrounding city as they discuss its - and their neighbours' - affairs. The muffrage, like the other rooms, is sparsely furnished, with cushions and carpets in colourful - even gaudy - contrast to the plain whiteness of the room. Houses may be built of stone, brick or mud-block, or, indeed, of all three. The construction work may be carried out by specialist craftsmen, or by the householder himself, who may even quarry his own stone and mould his own mud-blocks. These materials, though extremely cheap, are of excellent quality; houses built in this way will, with careful maintenance, long outlast their poor-quality concrete equivalents in Sana'a's new sprawling suburbs. In addition, local building techniques and materials are well-suited to Yemen's harsh highland climate, with its high daytime temperatures and often bitterly cold nights. The massive walls and roof, by storing the day's heat for night-time use, maintain inside the house a level and constantly comfortable temperature without the use of heating or ventilation systems. A city and buildings as fine as these grew from a rationale now partly vanishing. The urban population increases rapidly, with migration from rural areas and improving health standards. Family structures and customs change, leaving the now over-large city houses deserted for the new suburbs. Zoning laws, foreign technologies and materials intrude - some useful, but others ludicrously inappropriate and expensive. In meeting these new influences, the forms and styles of Yemeni towns and buildings will rightly change. In meeting Yemen's need for new housing, schools and hospitals, the country's ability to build well in cheap local materials is of an importance reaching far beyond merely architectural considerations. The economic case for the continued use of locally produced materials is clearly shown in the example given below by a Yemen-based UN architect, Alain Bertaud: "To meet the needs of the growing school-age population, 28,000 classrooms have to be built in the next decade. With the building methods recently used in most Government programmes (imported concrete, steel, etc.) this would represent a capital investment of $134million, of which $80million would be spent abroad on imported materials. The enormity of this demand on foreign exchange can be best appreciated when it is recalled that total exports from Yemen in 1970 were $3million....and that primary schools represent only a small part of the construction effort required in Yemen during the next ten years." 'Tradition serving Progress' Human Settlements Vol.2. No.2. April 1972