Çatalhöyük is a dense Neolithic settlement on the Konya Plain, inhabited for millennia from around 7,400 BCE. If Göbekli Tepe is a monumental enclosure, Çatalhöyük is the first large-scale system of everyday space — the dwelling.

The houses were built of sun-dried mud-brick and timber beams. The structural logic is radical: there are no streets between the buildings; each house abuts its neighbour, sharing party walls. The settlement is thus the sum not of separate buildings but of a continuous mass — a honeycomb-like fabric. This packed arrangement is both economical in material and laterally stable: every wall leans against the next.

Entry is not a doorway but the roof. People descended into the interior by timber ladder through openings in the flat earthen roofs, while the roofs themselves served as the circulation surface — the "street." Inside, hearths, ovens, plastered platforms, and wall paintings are fixed as permanent architectural elements. A worn house was demolished, levelled, and a new one built directly on top; over time the settlement rose as a mound (tell), so that architecture became a vertical sedimentation.

Çatalhöyük marks a critical threshold: wall, roof, and entrance are not yet differentiated, yet the dwelling is conceived as a repeatable type.