Wind-towers and pearl fishing: architectural signals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Arabian Gulf

The United Arab Emirates is a peninsular country located on the south-west side of the Arabian (Persian) Gulf and on the north-west banks of the Gulf of Oman (Figure 1). With an area of 83 600 square kilometres (Al Abed et al. 1996: 269), the United Arab Emirates consists of seven emirates: Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Qawain, Ras alKhaimah and Fujairah. It was known prior to confederation in 1971 as either the Trucial Coast or Trucial Oman and was dependent on the few resources that the difficult climate and geography offered. Small towns, villages and hamlets were strung along the coastal inlets and off-shore islands, and set into the interior desert oases and mountain wadis. Mountain and beach stone, coral, palm frond, mud brick, and the occasional palm log have served as the main building materials. The Emirates have long been regarded as having no great architectural tradition of the Islamic period. Indeed, we may reflect on Creswell’s biting conclusion that: ‘. . . Arabia, at the rise of Islam, does not appear to have possessed anything worthy of the name of architecture. Only a small proportion of the population was settled, and these lived in dwellings which were scarcely more than hovels’ (1932: 7). But these words were written in the 1930s, and are of their time, for since then greater appreciation for the inventiveness of the local building traditions has emerged. Through the Gulf generally, examples of late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture have been preserved and documentary texts about the buildings and their architectural styles have begun to appear. However, this existing evidence generally emphasises functional and decorative description over social context. In recent years, archaeological investigation, with its combination of scientific, imaginative