Manhattan from the desert: what skyscrapers were created over 400 years ago

What is a skyscraper? According to the Royal Spanish Academy, a high-rise building with many floors. The definition is certainly correct, perhaps only because it is imprecise. What is the great height? And how many floors are there several floors? There is no consensus or precise definition to identify and classify the building that defines modern architecture. Because in reality the definition of skyscrapers is as diffuse as its image is global. We all know what a skyscraper is when we see a photo of it: a modern steel tower that twists our necks to see it all the way.

But what if it’s not modern? In canonical treatises, the first skyscrapers are considered to have arisen in the city of Chicago at the end of the 19th century due to the rising cost of land, the use of the metal structure and the invention of the elevator. The rise in the price of land has made it necessary to make the most of the surface area of ​​the plots, and this was done by putting one floor on the other; the steel structure made it possible to thin the load-bearing elements of the building and the elevator (the braking system, in fact) made plausible the habitability of the floors beyond the seventh or eighth. After all, no one would agree to go up and down 160 steps every day to get to the office.

However, already in ancient Rome there were buildings up to ten heights which were accessible by elevators pulled by mules or slaves. Why don’t we think of these buildings as skyscrapers? Because they do not correspond to the canonical image. They weren’t towers because they weren’t thin. This is the key.

The skyscraper is not a high-rise building with many stories; It is a slender building composed of floors placed on top of each other. Yes, it is true that for this canonical image of slenderness to come true, it is essential that the building be modern, as a light structure that does not occupy too much floor will be necessary. But it doesn’t always happen like this.

In the Middle East, in the middle of the desert, there is a city full of skyscrapers. Slender towers made up of floors placed one on top of the other. Towers together and tight that challenge the rest of the neighboring buildings in height. But this is not Dubai, because the skyscrapers in this city are neither modern nor steel; they were built over four hundred years ago with adobe and lime.

Shibam it rises to the west of the Yemeni governorate of Hadramaut, a former sultanate which also encompassed part of present-day Oman and was, at the time, the most important region in the Gulf of Aden. Surrounded by the desert of Ramlat al-Sab’atayn, the first inhabitants of Shibam were ancient Bedouins who found an area in the oases of the region where abandon nomadic ways and settle permanently. During the first 13 centuries of its history, Shibam was neither a city nor a skyscraper; it looked like any desert village: one or two story square-plan, flat-roofed houses placed more or less near large irrigated plantations that were fed by the oasis. Also during these first 13 centuries of existence, the village was regularly subjected to attacks from Bedouin who took advantage of the crops that the inhabitants of Shibam had planted and harvested thanks to their irrigation systems. However, in the middle of the 16th century a disaster disrupted the existence of the city. And he did it for the best.

Torrential rains caused a series of severe flooding that almost completely destroyed the old mud houses. The survivors decided rebuild the village at the top of a nearby promontory. To protect themselves from the bandits, they surrounded it with a wall. The promontory being small to accommodate all the houses, the citizens had to reduce the area that their houses occupied on the ground floor. It would be a analogous phenomenon the increase in the cost of land in the downtown Chicago at the end of the 19th century. And its consequence was also similar: skyscrapers.

The buildings that have been erected, which they still exist today and they are still inhabited, They are constructions of up to 11 floors and more than 40 meters high. Of course, all in a square track of about five meters per side, just 25-30 square meters. Because each of these slender towers is a single dwelling. To all effects, these are single-family skyscrapers. Each begins with the stables (currently garages) on the ground floor and ends with the bedrooms on the upper floors. Among them, one or two noble floors, often double or 1/2 in height, which relieve the load on the exterior walls by means of slender wooden pillars.

Obviously, the skyscrapers of Shibam are not built with a steel structure but with clay baked in the sun. For this reason, the profile of the load-bearing walls is trapezoidal, widening at the base and lightening as it rises in height. A very elegant solution that required maintenance and reconstruction, but also resisted wind, droughts, cyclones, floods and camel attacks.

In 1982, UNESCO declared the old walled city of Shibam as Patrimonium of mankind. It was a way of declaring its value and promoting its protection. Currently in Shibam about 7000 people live and is known as “Manhattan of the desert»And also like« the Chicago of the sand ». But these comparisons make the Yemeni city something less, because for 400 years the towers of Shibam have stood like jinns – spirits of pre-Islamic Arab mythology – vigilant between the sand and the mountains, ancient guardians of the desert who protect their inhabitants and contemplate the sand of its adobe and lime walls, its hundred roofs and its thousand windows.

Unfortunately, wind and erosion are not the only threats to these formidable skyscrapers. In 2015, a car bomb detonated by ISIS operatives damaged several towers and UNESCO changed Shibam’s note to Heritage in danger. It would be terrible if a city more than 400 years old, built with giants of mud but as firm as concrete, disappeared because of human stupidity. A city between irrigation, desert and mountains in which century-old golems rise above the wall to gaze at the palm trees and listen to the cries of children and feel the wind, the sand and the weather.

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