Abstract
Vernacular architecture in Oman has sustained through centuries providing its population with a place to inhabit in a harsh environment. However, after the oil boom in the Gulf-States, technological advances coupled with high income generation from oil industry, led locals to transform their lifestyles rapidly. Resulting in abandoning oasis settlements in order to move to the peripheries of cities, or into urban city centers where, both job prospective and livelihood was better. These developments led to a continuous decay of Oman’s historic oasis settlements over the last decades. The looming global climate crisis is leading to widespread life-style transformations, enforced by major economic, social and political pressure. Global emergencies like the currently on-going COVID-19 pandemic will accelerate this process rapidly. While searching for strategies to address these problems in the context of urban and architectural design, the focus is shifting towards vernacular forms of living. It is therefore essential to identify the patterns of resilience in vernacular ways of living and understand the design strategies and factors that were the key to its continuous sustenance over centuries. The paper aims to showcase patterns of resilience in vernacular settlement structures, based on a case study of historic oasis settlement of Al Hamra and to identify to what extent these vernacular settlements were resilient in the past and if they can be adaptable to the needs and demands of contemporary user groups. Furthermore, this paper tries to unpack how these features of resilience could contribute to facilitate the expected lifestyle transformations, induced by the global problems mentioned above. Thus, the paper aims to touch upon the following research questions: First, what were the guiding principles that underlined the self-sustenance characteristics of Al-Hamra in the past? Second, what strategies and factors need to be sustained to safeguard its resilience? And third, what factors can be adapted to fit the current need? To provide comprehensive answers to the research questions, the paper takes a qualitative research approach using tools such as archive-analysis, expert & semi-structured interviews, spatial mapping and photography. Merriam Webster defines resilience as “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” Unfortunately, the oasis settlements were unable to sustain the socio-economic change that came about in the Gulf-Stated after the oil boom. However, they still possess important lessons. The paper concludes, emphasizing the need to preserve heritage, encouraging us to look into reanimating oasis settlements. Furthermore, the paper identifies the self-sustaining characteristics of Al.-Hamra, which provides proof of how resilient oasis settlements could be with the inclusion of the human factor. With the removal of the human factor however, these characteristics start to fade away. This paper uncovers 3 major cycles that acted as the base of sustenance in Al-Hamra’s heyday. The cyclical processes of water-supply, agriculture and architecture cycle keeping the human factor at its core. Furthermore, it presents the adaptive capacity of the currently functioning cycles (Agriculture and Water) and poses questions on degree of decay of the existing buildings. Finally, the importance of the paper is two-fold. First, it brings to light the capacity of knowledge that can be extracted from the self-sustaining principles of Al-Hamra. Second, the paper emphasizes the need for respecting heritage and vernacular ways of living in the light of current global crisis situations.
