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How to read a fort
Wind towers, coral blocks and a single central pillar. The architecture is a climate strategy.
Every fort in the country is a set of answers to the same question: how do you keep a room cool without power? The wind tower is the clearest one — a four-sided shaft that catches any breeze and drops it into the room below.
The walls are the second answer. Coral block cut from the shallows and set in gypsum has thermal mass and it breathes; the same material appears in Al Fahidi in Dubai and in the pearling village of Al Jazirah Al Hamra.
At Al Bidyah in Fujairah, built around 1446, four domes rest on one central pillar — the oldest known mosque in the country, and a structural idea you will not see repeated anywhere else on the coast.