Open Garden or Enclosed Courtyard? Models and Critiques of the Concept of Privacy in Danish Neighborhood Design (1960s-1980s)

‘You architects may need privacy, but the rest of us here don't do anything in our gardens that we should hide’. These words were spoken by a future resident of the Nivå and Åtoften neighborhoods (north of Copenhagen) during a consultation meeting around 1960 with Danish architect Hans Hartvig Skaarup. The latter recounted them in the review Arkitekten (1976) to illustrate the inhabitants’ response to his proposal for introducing homes with enclosed courtyards inspired by Arabic-Islamic models—a prototype that broke with Denmark’s front-and-rear garden tradition. While Skaarup’s essay highlights the large-scale planning of inward-looking homes, it also reflects on the growing critique of their desocializing effects that emerged in the following years. On one hand, this period saw the gradual rejection of the patio home design in the Danish architectural debate, a critique articulated by architect Torben Kirstein’s analysis (1976) of half-private and half-public spaces. On the other hand, the same period saw a reorientation of Danish planning programs in the Middle East and North Africa where projects drew on local traditions of privacy expressed through inward-looking neighborhood typologies. Two examples illustrate this shift: mass housing designed by the engineering firm Larsen and Nielsen Hans Munk Hansen in the Gulf countries. This paper examines this key moment of divergence in how Danish architects approached the concept of privacy. By comparing the critique of patio home design in Denmark with the concurrent export of inward-looking models to the MENA, it highlights how neighborhood design functioned as a medium for negotiating privacy.