21；For people living around the courtyard, the space provides a sense of safety and privacy; the courtyard is a quasi-public space that mediates between the home and the street. For the city at large, the courtyard is an urbane housing type that can fit well into a variety of different settings, including single-family housing.
22；Strangely, almost no such courtyards have been built in Los Angeles since the early 1930s. In recent years, however, Elizabeth Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides, partners in the firm Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists, have attempted to revive the form with a dozen projects in Southern California.
23；Two of their recent projects are "Seven Fountains" in West Hollywood and "Mission-Meridien," a mixed-use project at a future light-rail station in South Pasadena. They show Moule and Polyzoides trying to adapt the courtyard to modern-day requirements, while issuing an implicit challenge to the building industry about standardization.
24；"Modern architecture is not about style," Polyzoides says. "The original intent of modernism was about solving new problems." Each new site, each budget, must be approached as a new problem, even while preserving the basic typology of the courtyard.
25；Polyzoides and Moule approach architectural design as town planners would. They design the open spaces —— the courtyards, landscaping, and parking，and then arrange the housing units around these conditions. This is key to their nonstandardized approach. The typical developer would arrange the units, usually at the maximum density allowed by zoning, and then afterwards carve out some space for planting, patios, or a central courtyard. Although nearly all small apartment buildings have courtyards of some kind, they are rarely well designed or inviting spaces.
26；In West Hollywood, Moule and Polyzoides have taken a style that might be forgotten —— the Mediterranean style —— and turned out a beautiful, intelligent, supple building, full of formal beauty and surprise. The project attests to Polyzoides' belief that style is secondary to the deeper issues of architectural thinking.
27；Insofar as it is not "abstract," Seven Fountains is not a modernist building. But it is a completely contemporary building, with many unshowy lessons learned from ancients and moderns alike. Here, on a site of 180 by 160 feet (55 by 50 meters), the courtyard typology is used with virtuosity and freedom to create a series of interconnecting courtyards, each with its own character.