- Ottoman houses description
The most two important references, that have described Ottoman houses in Cairo are:
1- “Palais et maisons du Caire. Tome II: Époque Ottomane (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles)” that mainly described the Cairene houses which were owned by elite and upper middle class society.
2- “Habiter au Caire: La Maison Moyenne et ses habitants aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles, Cairo, 1991” that mainly described the traditional houses which were owned by middle class society.
They are registered according to the Egyptian law on the protection of antiquities no. 117 of 1983. They were built after Fatimid and Mamluk periods and they occupied the spaces that were empty between the existing buildings. So, these houses have irregular shape in floor plan level.
They characterized by verticality (2-3 floors) and dense occupation due to the high cost of land. There are spaces for receiving guests and other use-s for family living. So, the design of these houses was requested to separate the circulation between them to achieve the privacy for the family members \citep{gawad1978islamic}.
Architectural features were used as a tool to achieve privacy too. These architectural features influenced the housing design and achieved different architectural solutions of housing during Ottoman era \citep{hafez2005the}. Several researches discussed the architectural features from social and environmental point of view. In the following table E (part 1&2), there is a conclusion for the main ideas in these researches in addition to schematic plan that shows the distribution of these features, figure (18, 19, 20).