Darat al Funun renovation

The Houses of the Darat al Funun type have a symmetrical floor plan, a central hall with a line of rooms at each side. The central hall often has a porch with pillars covering the front entrance; while at the other end of this hall is another back entrance. Both of the two entrances of this central hall are located in the middle of each end wall, having rooms on each side. This central room can only receive sufficient light from windows symmetrically flanking each door in the front and back walls. Being oblong, with a length at least twice its width, the central hall becomes the connecting space for the rooms on each side.

	The side rooms are almost square,with doors leading from each room to the other, directly beside the door that leads to the central hall. In such a layout doors are numerous. Up to 8 doors can be found in the walls of the central hall, and 3 in the walls of the side rooms. These houses had floor plans with doors in abundance, but in terms of the privacy of the individual as we see it today; they left much to be desired. From the front porch, doors leading to the side room are used by guests to enter without passing through the central hall, thus providing privacy only to protect the members of the household from outsiders, rather that one member of the family from the other. This typical floor plan of the 1920s, referred to as "the central hall house" or "the three bay house," could be seen as rooms surrounding a small roofed courtyard. Its origin is also explained by looking at the structural logic of symmetrically combining negative spaced with walls in between.

Similar to typical floor plans of barns, churches, and many other prototypical structures, the central hall house has three lines of roofed spaces contained by four lines of structural walls. This arrangement of an odd number of voids and an even number of structural lines also works on different scales, the only difference being that one void and two side walls provide a single room or a linear house one-room-wide, whereas five voids and six structural lines, or any bigger odd number of void with bigger even numbers of structural lines, would result in a dark room at the centre of the building.