by Assassi, A., Zidani, H., Mebarki, A., Sekhri, A. and Hamouda, A.
ABSTRACT
The archaeological urban environment can be divided into an extern and an inner of buildings. The extern environment contains different infrastructures and superstructures, which can be identified through its urban typo-morphological logic. The inner environment of buildings, which via this paper focuses on, concentrating on spaces within buildings, means their organization, their order of functions, their spatial system, and their spaces genotype. This research aims to deduce the culture of ancient civilizations towards the way of organ-izing the inner functions and spaces within buildings. The first hypothesis said that each society has its own point of view, its own logic of ordering functions and topological relations between them. Each society has its own way of thinking toward the spatial structure within each type of buildings. The second hypothesis said that there are spatial organization similarities within the inner environment of buildings of ancient civiliza-tions. In affirming the hypotheses, the research adopts space syntax as a quantitative approach developed by the Laboratory of Space Syntax, UCL (University College London), which focuses on relationships between dif-ferent spatial layouts and cultural and environmental phenomena. Space syntax approach goes beyond the descriptive aspect by using developed software such as Agraph. In this research, we followed the comparative methodology between four courtyard houses chosen from ancient civilizations, such as Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, and Chinese.
