Natural coolness

Long before air-conditioning, the architecture of the riad knew how to cool without consuming. The principle is simple and proven for millennia: a patio open to the sky, surrounded by high rooms and thick walls of pisé or raw brick, creates a chimney effect — hot air rises and escapes at the top, while cooler air circulates at ground level.

Malqaf — the tower that captures the wind

The Arabs name this principle malqaf (ملقف, “the catcher”). Its trace is found as early as pharaonic Egypt — the house of Neb-Amon, around 1300 BCE, already bears the device. The Islamic period takes up and refines this technique, spreading it from Iraq toward the Levant and Egypt.

To humidify and further cool the captured air, builders often associate it with the salsabīl (سلسبيل) — that same blade of water on marble found in the patio of the Riad. A well-documented example: the house of Muhib al-Dîn al-Shâfiʿî al-Muwaqqiʿ, in Cairo, around 1350, where malqaf, salsabīl and lantern form a single system of air circulation.

In Persia and the Gulf, this same principle takes another form: the badgir (بادگیر), a multi-directional tower rather than one oriented toward a single dominant wind — a variant of the same architectural gesture, born of the same need. It is the same Persian culture that gives the garden of the Riad its cross geometry: air and water, two forms of the same climatic intelligence.

Cast shade, the water of the basin, vegetation: each element contributes. No mechanical appliance. Coolness is a result of form, not of the machine.

At Riad Al-Uns, this principle is respected and reinforced: orientation, proportions, materials — the house breathes.