Qasr Al Hosn

Qasr Al Hosn is Abu Dhabi Island’s oldest and most significant building, incorporating the city’s first permanent structure, a coral and sea stone watchtower, and comprising two iconic buildings: The Inner Fort (c1795) and The Outer Palace (1939-45). Over the centuries it has been home to the ruling family, the seat of governance, a consultative council and a national archive, physically encapsulating the development of Abu Dhabi from a settlement reliant on fishing and pearling to a modern metropolis. Following nine years of intensive conservation, Qasr Al Hosn has been restored as a national monument and transformed into a museum. The repair, restoration and revitalisation of Qasr Al Hosn has aimed to preserve the historic fabric of the individual buildings and to provide a regulatory framework for the future management and use of the block. The Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi conceived the concept design for Qasr Al Hosn, carefully conserving each element of the building’s architectural ensemble to its era of origin. This approach of making the evolution of building legible, and also the authenticity of the historic fabric readily identifiable, relied heavily on physical investigations and archival research undertaken over an extensive period of time. This research enabled the conservation works to illustrate the intelligence of traditional building techniques in creating a habitable dwelling in a hot, arid coastal desert environment from a limited palette of materials. The concept not only aimed to conserve and restore the building fabric but to also reinstate the historic coastal desert context in which the building was historically set. This provides an immediate appreciation of Qasr Al Hosn’s relationship with the land and its vernacular origins. The walls of Qasr Al Hosn were originally constructed from coral and sea stone, which was bedded and rendered with a traditional lime, sand and sea shell paste known as Jus Bahar (Mortar of the Beach). As this compound was made from the white sand from the nearby shore line, the walls would sparkle in the sunlight, leading Qasr Al Hosn to be known as the White Fort. The ceilings and floors were originally constructed using mangrove poles (Chandel) and layers of woven matting (Hasera) from palm fronds (Areesh). This floor structure was then layered with stone rubble then compacted and finished with burnt lime, clay, straw and a compound called Sarooj. The flat, coastal desert landscape that once naturally surrounded its fortified walls served to make Qasr Al Hosn a highly visible structure within the historic settlement of Abu Dhabi. The buffer space created around the Fort by the reinstatement of this natural landscape provides a respectful setting for this significant heritage building, acting architecturally in a similar way to the placement of a precious artefact on a podium or plinth. The Architectural reinstatement of this context enables visitors to appreciate the building’s vernacular origins, its magnitude, majesty and the imposing relationship it once had as the protector of the historic settlement. Throughout the conservation process, Qasr Al Hosn has been identified as a ‘Living Memorial’. A physical timeline of the story of Abu Dhabi, political, social and economic developments are all highly evident within its Architecture. Its surrounding landscape and courtyard enclosures provide an appropriate cultural setting which serves to encourage the sharing of historic quotidian memories, traditions and experiences. These spaces are restored to encourage conversations which in turn serve to preserve and transmit precious intangible memories from generation to generation of Emiratis as well as to travelers who will journey onwards with greater knowledge and appreciation of the culture of these lands.