Thus, although the constructions are usually located without receding areas from the alignment of the lot fronting the street, they do not cover the whole breath of the lot, but rather they extend lengthways as narrow oblong stripes. The access into the building is only possible by traversing the space of the yard. This space organisation lends the impression of depth and ?porosity? to the image of the street fronts and they remained characteristic of the whole central area. The yard fronting the street delimited by transparent fences, and that serves, as intermediary space on one?s way in remains an omnipresent element of almost all constructions. The wagon-house, so specific to the end of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th, (when their high density, as well as the deep and long lots could have determined a terraced type of building), could represent a phase of this transition. This aspect appears also with the villa and the apartment building from the inter-war period, where an original vernacular model is out of the question. In the case of the implantation of some modern houses in an old tissue, the maintained ?porosity? can be explained by the preserved traditional design of the building lot and the compulsory areas receding from the alignment as compared to the neighbouring constructions. But these spaces do not disappear even in the case of the great boulevards of the ?30s that represent the most heroic attempt of the inter-war period of imposing on Bucharest a sense of modern metropolis. The interior yards are usually reduced to the role of light and ventilation shafts, and the buildings front the public space through real ?courts of honour? or at least through important areas receding from the general alignment, marking the identity of each particular house against an otherwise rather rigorously defined front.

This type of design of the building lot has certain common characteristics with the model of the garden-city, which lead to its success, in various ways, from the villa districts to the ensembles of cheap houses (the detached house model has been put into practice in the West, only in the peripheral areas, and has always been considered as being less ?urban?). But this is diametrically opposed to living around an interior yard, that characterises the Arabian and the Antique Mediterranean town. The climatic factor seems to be the decisive factor of this comparison. On the other hand, one of the most representative elements of the Western town is the urban block, delimited by streets and defined by a row of buildings that make a continuous front. We find this logic of the exterior, of the constructions that form the limit, and of some private or semi-private interior spaces both in the Medieval town and in numberless Modern models (except of the Modernist town planning, characterised by isolated buildings, floating in a continuous space). The possible enclosed spaces between the street and the buildings (?the front yard?) have almost always a representational aspect very different from the much more intimate atmosphere of the spaces hidden in the very core of the block (?the back yard or garden?).