To passers-by, the curious structures that have started to appear on a patch of waste ground in downtown Al Ain are something of a mystery.
Handmade by a team of master craftsmen from the historic environment department at the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority (TCA), the dome-like structures consist of arches built from bundles of palm fronds neatly bound together with rope.
At first sight, the structure looks like it might be a new extension of the small heritage village that greets visitors to the neighbouring Al Ain National Museum, just a few metres away on the far side of the Eastern Fort.
But appearances are deceptive. Rather than a reconstruction of Al Ain’s past, the domes, or gridshells as they are known, look to a future where millennia-old skills and construction techniques are fused with modern engineering to create what could be one of the UAE’s most innovative architectural and humanitarian exports.
“We want to demonstrate how we can reintroduce renewable resources – date palm leaves in this case – back into the mainstream construction industry,” explains Sandra Piesik, the UK-based architect who is the driving force behind the Food Shelter.
“At the moment, when we think of arish we associate it with the past, with baskets, and products and heritage villages. But before the 1950s, arish was the urban fabric of the city.
“We’ve found pictures of Dubai with 4,000 palm leaf houses. Liwa had 800 palm leaf houses.”
The Food Shelter has been designed as a possible solution to some of the developing world’s most serious challenges: climate change, desertification, the increasing scarcity of resources, food security and food waste.
In India alone, 40 per cent of food is wasted because of a lack of adequate places to shelter and store it.
There are only three gridshells in Al Ain at the moment, but there will be nine by the time the Food Shelter is complete in late November.
Then the whole structure will be covered with a specially designed tensile canopy being made in Dubai.
It will be the first time that a palm leaf structure has been combined with such a modern material and the result will be a 576-square-metre, semi-permanent structure Ms Piesik believes will be the first modern arish building in the Middle East.
“Our goal is to demonstrate that arish can be used to make a modern building, something large enough to be able to accommodate a modern use.”
Such is the scale of the problem addressed by the Food Shelter, that the project has already been endorsed by the UN Commission to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
Ms Piesik plans to present the findings of the completed project at the UNCCD’s third scientific conference in Cancun, Mexico, next March.
The theme of the conference is battling drought, land degradation and desertification to reduce poverty and for sustainable development, which makes the Food Shelter an ideal case study.
“There is a shortage of resources globally. There are even wars because of the lack of resources, and in my view we need to use what we have better,” says Ms Piesik, with a genuine sense of urgency.
“Materials such as arish are currently seen as agricultural waste, but it has been used for thousands of years so we need to see if this material can do something that might serve a wider purpose.”
For her and her collaborators on the project, the relative abundance of palms in regions affected by desertification also make arish a worthy candidate as a sustainable building material of the future.
“Date palms grow in 46 countries, but there are 2,500 species of palm globally and there are over 80 countries that have palms in cultivation south of the Tropic of Cancer,” Ms Piesik says. “That means that the reuse of these materials has the potential to be a global movement.”
The oldest evidence for the use of date palm architecture in the UAE was discovered on Delma Island, where archaeologists found the remains of a house built from palm trunks.
A date stone from the site was carbon dated by scientists at the University of York, who found the remains were about 7,000 years old.
There are other, more immediate factors that make the UAE an ideal location for the material’s revival, including the abundance of the raw material.
There are an estimated 147,000 date palms of 100 varieties in the Al Ain oasis and 42 million date palms throughout the whole of the UAE. Ms Piesik’s figures show each is capable of generating 100 dried palm leaves annually.
There is also a near-ideal combination of climatic conditions similar to those experienced by some of the most impoverished communities in the region, and the wealth and stability to enable further research and development.
“Doing this in the UAE demonstrates the potential of the project and allows us to test how we might make it work better in a more challenging environment,” explains Jim Coleman, the head of economics at the consultancy Buro Happold Engineering in London.
“The UAE provides us with a benevolent environment where it’s easy to test things.
“What we don’t want to do is to go to somewhere and do something when we haven’t really designed it properly or thought about the strategy properly and it doesn’t really work.
“It’s better to test it first before you take it into a more challenging environment and try to understand the kind of things that might go wrong.”
A development economist who normally spends his time investigating the economic impact of new cities and major urban infrastructure projects, Mr Coleman calls himself Ms Piesik’s “economic sounding board”.
“I think this project has already proved itself as an environmental and a social model, but what we want to do is to make sure that it’s going to have an economic impact that is also positive,” he says.
“In my experience, projects are more likely to succeed when you take a holistic view [and] we want to enable communities to sustain themselves financially by providing them with something they need in the form of shelter, but that also generates an economic impact because it’s a business, or a way of developing skills, or of providing facilities, or of generating revenue off the back of those facilities.”
The concepts that have informed the development of the prototype Food Shelter will be put in to practice soon after the Al Ain project has been completed.
In collaboration with the Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem Society, Ms Piesik is taking the project to oasis communities in Palestine’s West Bank.
“Since 2012 we’ve been looking for a community that we could engage with, to take the project beyond the experimental level. And through an advertisement on the UNCCD website, we made a contact in Palestine,” she says.
“The idea is that we will help the community to improve agricultural productivity of their oases and we will work with local women on a women and children’s centre because there’s a genuine need for a place where women and children can congregate.”
Ms Piesik and Mr Coleman are two members of a team that has taken the Food Shelter from its earliest experiments six years ago at Liwa to a point where the project is about to go live.
It’s a team that includes architects, anthropologists, archaeologists, structural engineers, agricultural experts and TCA’s team of master craftsmen, most of whom would normally use arish to restore historic monuments such as Al Ain’s Al Jahili and Muwaiji forts.
But despite all their efforts, Ms Piesik insists more research and development is needed.
“We need an organisation to take this on,” she says. “We have all this knowledge but we ideally need an organisation to pursue the R&D in a serious way precisely because the properties of arish are so convincing.
“You can even save energy with arish because it reflects the sun. In Liwa, we discovered that by using khoos, the small leaves from the palm, the temperature in an arish house was around 23°C cooler than the temperature outside.”
For the archaeologist Peter Sheehan, TCA’s head of historic buildings and landscapes and Ms Piesik’s main collaborator in the UAE, part of the Food Shelter’s value comes from the fact that it could resonate with so many different communities.
“Archaeology is in there, architecture is in there, so is care for the environment and that’s the way things work,” Mr Sheehan says.
“One of our main jobs, in the public domain, is to provide information that enables communities to be aware of what’s going on and that allows them to make informed decisions.
“If people aren’t made aware of the contemporary possibilities they will never be able to make a decision about how to manage both the historic environment and the built environment in general.
“The same is true for archaeology and historic buildings, and in the end, if we don’t provide information like this for people, how can they make the right decisions about their future?”
nleech@thenational.ae