Barasti

Barasti, also known as arish, is the palm-leaf building tradition of the Arabian Gulf. Walls and roofs were made from the fronds of the date palm, tied over a light frame, producing shaded, ventilated shelters suited to the hot, humid summers of the coast. In the United Arab Emirates, the Bedouin used arish shelters in the summer months.

Construction

The date palm supplied almost the whole building: trunks for posts, and dried fronds tied into panels and bundles for walls and roof. Frames were often made from mangrove poles imported from East Africa (the same imported timber used in coral-stone houses; see chandal-roof). In Qatar the word barasti refers to palm or reed shading. Building an arish house was a community effort carried out by families and tribes.

Scale

Arish was not marginal. In the 1950s Dubai had as many as 4,000 arish houses sheltering about 12,000 people, and Liwa about 800. The tradition goes back a very long way in the region: a house roughly 7,000 years old on Delma Island was built from palm trunks.

Decline

After oil was discovered in the late 1950s, concrete, glass and steel rapidly replaced palm-leaf building. The material had not been developed technically and is less durable than concrete. Most of the craftspeople who mastered arish have since died.

Revival

The architect and researcher Sandra Piesik, who has studied arish since 2008 and wrote Arish: Palm-Leaf Architecture, argues for laboratory testing and new hybrid uses. She notes that the UAE has about 42 million date palms, each producing dried leaves now largely treated as agricultural waste, and that palm leaves reflect sunlight much better than concrete and glass. Reconstructions can be seen at heritage sites such as Sharjah's Al Hisn Fort and Hatta.

Related

Barasti belongs to the same family as palm-thatch roofs elsewhere in the tropics. It differs from the permanent coral-stone and mud houses of Gulf towns, which used heavy flat roofs on imported poles.