Pictures of what a patio looks like

What a patio looks like is an open space in the center when there are houses on four sides, houses on three sides and a wall on one side, or houses on two sides and a wall on the other two sides.

The word "patio" is used in canonical texts to refer to a terrain that is high on all sides and low in the center. For example, in Sun Tzu's The Art of War, "Where there is an absolute stream, a well in the sky, a jail, a skyrocket, a sky trap must be witch to go, do not approach." As a form of architectural space, the patio is commonly found in traditional Chinese houses from the Ming and Qing dynasties to the present.

When did the patio first emerge, there is no trace of it. However, as the ground-level houses with wooden bones and mud walls were born from cave dwellings, the "well space" in the house evolved from the "pit well" in the cave dwellings, which logically should be the patio. Therefore, the patio in China has been in ancient times, probably not later than the Western Zhou Shaanxi Qishan Fengyi Village courtyard.

Southern residential patio combination is more common, the use of the form of the patio and the local climatic conditions, social systems, habits, etc. are closely linked. The "Shikumen" in the southeastern Shanghai area is a "three-up, three-down" patio-style residence. The plan form is derived from the traditional triad house, with the door changed to a shikumen and the front yard changed to a patio, forming three rooms and two compartments and other variants.

The real-life patio:

The main door is usually located on the central axis, and inside is a rectangular or square patio, with the guest room in the center of the main house, the secondary rooms and compartments on the left and right, the horizontal staircase at the back of the guest room, and then a horizontal rectangular patio, and finally a single-story stove and other auxiliary rooms. Southwestern Yunnan place "a seal" body shape square "three rooms, four ears down eight seats" of the patio plan is a typical combination. The so-called "three four ears", that is, the main room three rooms, ear room east and west of two rooms, a little larger than the three six ears, bright three dark five.

The main house is often a building, with a front porch called "Yuchun", and the upper and lower corridors are called "Gonglou". Residential periphery for the high wall, the wall by the main house, rooms and inverted eight seats around the central axis to form a patio, patio planting flowers and trees, the house does not open the windows to the outside world, the formation of a closed and isolated environment.

Fuzhou "three squares and seven lanes" residential use of boundary wall and stone frame door, boundary wall refers to the mansion in the perpendicular to the wall of the tall solid wall, can play a role in fire prevention. Its location is mostly found after the gate house (or the back wall of the gate house), but also in the halls after the formation of some small patio space, such as the "crab eye patio" of the Suzhou residence. The back wall of the boundary has a variety of functions such as preventing western sunshine, preventing north wind, guiding airflow and ventilation, and reflecting and brightening.

Refer to Baidu Wikipedia - Patio