Draw the building first and the garden becomes a margin: a strip of grass at the front where nobody sits, a service corridor at the side, and a paved rectangle at the back that gets full sun from noon until seven. This is the standard result on a Tashkent plot, and it is the reason so many families end up living entirely indoors from June to September.
The traditional hovli did the opposite. The rooms were arranged around the open space, not in front of it, and the ayvon — the deep shaded terrace between them — was where the household actually spent the day. It was a climate device before it was a cultural one: the courtyard holds cool night air, the surrounding mass shades it, and the temperature difference does the ventilation for you.
We have measured this on our own sites. At Paxsa Villa in Yakkasaroy, the courtyard runs between four and eight degrees cooler than the street between one and five in the afternoon, without any mechanical help. The determining factors are not decorative: the ratio of open width to wall height, the presence of water, and whether there is a tree with a mature canopy.
None of this requires a historical style. Chinor House is a flat-roofed concrete and brick building with no arches anywhere in it, and it works the same way, because the geometry is the same. Rooms on three sides, an opening to the south-east for the morning, and a tree that was there before we were.
The practical test is simple, and you can apply it to any plan you are shown. Ask where the family will be at four o'clock on a Saturday in July. If the answer is 'inside, with the curtains closed', the plan has a courtyard on paper and nowhere to sit in reality.
