Exploring the Hidden Dimension in the Islamic Architecture: The Medina of Tunis as a Study Case

Over and above any document or written material, the mythological, the Sacred, the Ritual and the Legendary are instrumental in the production and occupancy of both spaces and places. Creative imagination is the point of conversion for such notions; it is going to directly shape up the inhabit. The present study is an attempt to fathom this hidden dimension which animates the Medina of Tunis, thereby allowing us to gauge an unsuspected facet of its practices and its living experiences. The ideas we are developing here concern the relationship between the inhabit practices and the representation systems produced by and within a given (the process being auto-centric). For, throughout this work we will be focusing on how the cosmogonical system, the hidden dimension and the imaginary all impact the living spaces. The architectural and urban space will then act as the mirror reflecting a whole vision of the world while the Medina of Tunis has been chosen as our field survey. Consequently, underlying this study is the hypothesis that the practices involved in life in the medina unfold within actual present locations. Such spaces are indeed the material support for the inhabit, i.e. the house, the door-step, the entrance, the sqifa, the patio, the street, the mosque…. But such practices (this is where our hypothesis comes in) are enacted quite as really through the doubling of these locations with a “referent†, or a reference space. Such a referent may not be present materially and physically, but “it is there†all the same to inform the daily inhabit-related practices.