Older cities＇ urban configurations still constitute sources of inspiration for architects and urban designers. However, in most cases, instead of extracting ideas and processes, designers, under identitarian, environmental and economical pressures, tend to favour the imitation of the older configurations and end up with frozen copies from the past. This paper suggests an approach based on abstract concepts drawn from past experiences and filtered and refined through physical and environmental design variables. One of these variables is examined here and serves as a filtering technique; the shading control.