Listening to Pigeons: A history of an avian typology

Landscapes of the Middle East and North Africa are dotted with the distinctive architecture of the pigeon tower. For Ahmed and Rashid bin Shabib, the towers are indicative of a past of closer human‑bird relations and offer a possibility for renewed forms of coexistence.

Our infatuation with pigeon towers (or dovecotes) began in January 2020 on a visit to Marrakech and Alexandria, just before the Covid-19 pandemic brought the world to a halt. The north African terrains that we passed on our drives between cities, towns and farms were riddled with pigeon towers; they defined these landscapes. Built from mud, lime, clay, earth, terracotta, salt or, more recently, assembled from scrap wood and corrugated sheets on top of other buildings, the towers are an unmistakable typology within the city fabric. Why are there so many?

Our mother, being a master negotiator (far more capable than we are in bakhshish), managed to get us into a few houses and farms to study these towers. It became clear to us why they remain relevant within north African cities, particularly in Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt and the Sahel region: they are a part of local livelihood and welfare. In a region facing significant turmoils, having a pigeon tower can make a difference between life or death.

Pigeon-keeping has been present in the Middle East since the dawn of agriculture. ¹ Throughout the centuries farmers across the region have learnt to breed them for food and eggs, also realising that their droppings made for superior fertiliser and as an ingredient in a process to soften leather. ² Rich in phosphorus, potassium and nitrogen, the droppings enabled an increased agricultural production in the region. In the pigeon breeding heyday, travellers during the 17th century counted as many as 3,000 pigeon towers in Isfahan with the largest breeding as many as 14,000 birds at a time. ³ Across the region, farmers diversified their crops by growing olives, grapevines, figs and vegetables by constructing pigeon towers that acted as fertiliser factories.

Throughout the centuries, farmers across the Middle East, from Jerusalem, Rosetta, Damascus, Baghdad, and as far as Isfahan and Tangier, experimented with architectural iterations of pigeon towers. Depending on the material resources of the region, different bricks, string courses, moulded mud, brick cornices, Muqarnas and friezes decorated these structures. In the Levantine region, pigeon towers were mostly circular or turreted. Within North Africa, they are either domed or mimic fort-like buildings. Across East Africa and Madagascar, pigeon towers are assembled from wood and are elevated from the ground with pitched hay roofs. However, the most recognisable of all are Isfahan’s pigeon towers. Vaulted and intricately detailed, with majestic turrets, these towers can provide shelter to tens of thousands of pigeons.

What all the pigeon towers share across this vast region are their functions. They all are built with a honeycomb structure, which allows the birds to fly inside, plus a small side door providing access for caretakers, who enter once a year to extract the manure.

In the western desert of Egypt, the oasis settlement of Siwa has long been a pilgrimage site for architects who come to visit its pigeon towers and other buildings. ⁴ Here, there is an ancient form of vernacular architecture, mostly built from kershef, a material made of salt crystals mixed with clay and sand. The siwani khershef brick has become something of a signature in the town’s architectural identity. Small, irregularly shaped blocks are taken from the crust of salt lakes, cut into smaller bricks and distributed to the ma’alim, or masons. They are then formed into a mud mortar with one of two forms of clay: tafla or tiin. The dehydration process is crucial to its enduring rigidity. The salt within the mortar continues to crystallise during the drying process, forming a strong bond between the materials. The uniqueness of Siwa’s architecture demonstrates that urban infrastructure can use ecological means – mostly salt and earth – to sustain a population of 20,000. The pigeon towers of Siwa are assembled using this vernacular architectural style, which is an exclusive technique native to this rural village.

More recently, contemporary architects began to experiment with these structures. In Egypt, Hassan Fathy and Wissa Wasif worked closely with craftsmen (الحرفيين alhirafeen), creating pigeon tower designs for use beyond breeding. They experimented with potters, carpenters and masons, iterating the pigeon tower’s architectural contours.

In Barcelona’s Parque Güell in Spain, Antoni Gaudí also intentionally designed architectural elements that would allow for birds and pigeons to nest. Gaudí built long terraced walls and turrets that would incorporate nests for pigeons and a variety of other avians to reside in.

Oscar Niemeyer’s O Pombal pigeon house in Brasília must be the most iconic pigeon tower of modern times. With its oblong-ovate openings on two sides, this giant concrete plinth, constructed in 1960, stands in the centre of the Praça dos Três Poderes, at the heart of Brazil’s capital. Its interior is constructed with thin rows of horizontal concrete shelves for hundreds of pigeons to perch and roost in.

Pigeon towers, beyond architecture

Beyond the use of their inhabitants as an agricultural resource, there is a more complicated history to the pigeon tower. The towers were also a form of weaponised architecture. As early as 3,000 BC, Egyptians discovered that pigeons were capable of returning to the towers they were born in. A pigeon can find its way home from as far away as 3,900 km with a speed up to 160km per hour; the equivalent of flying from New York to Los Angeles in under two days (unless eaten by its nemesis, the peregrine falcon). Magnetoreception is the reason why these exceptional creatures are able to navigate vast and complex terrains. A biological sense that enables an organism to detect a magnetic field in order to determine its direction, height, or position. ⁵ A wide range of species employ this sensory modality for orientation and navigation, as well as to create regional maps. ⁶ The ability of a small bird to be capable of such a task is unimaginable. One wonders if the latest AI drone technology is capable of this? It would probably run out of battery power.

Across history, humans have been exploiting the migration and homing capabilities of pigeons. First, they were used to dispatch letters. ⁷ Pigeons have been used to send letters back and forth between people since Baghdad in the 11th century. Later, pigeons were used by the military to send commands, encrypted messages and other information in conflicts ranging from Waterloo to Second World War. Paul Reuter started his eponymous news service with 45 pigeons, which he used to deliver stock prices across Europe. Pigeon photography also became an active military technique in the early-20th century. Invented by Julius Neubronner, a German apothecary, who also used pigeons to deliver medicine, pigeon photography was used for aerial reconnaissance during the First World War. Still today, homing pigeons are used for smuggling. Pigeons have been discovered carrying cell phones, SIM cards, phone batteries and USB cords into prisons in Brazil.

Although the last pigeon post was still operational in India until 2008, many argue that this historic relationship with pigeons (and pigeon towers) has now been all but severed. ⁸ Technological advancements in radars, satellites and logistics as well as fertiliser manufacturing have replaced the old global network of pigeon towers. In many ways, the industrialisation of navigation networks and the introduction of other modern technology disrupted
our balance with nature. ⁹

What can pigeon towers inform us about our current anthropogenic practices? The topic of people, nature and architecture was widely explored by Bernard Rudosfsky’s Architecture Without Architects exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1964, and written about extensively in Rifat Chadirji’s صفة الجمال في وعي الانسان (The Characteristics of Beauty in Man’s Consciousness), and Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order. ¹⁰ But what does this mean to us now? How can a pigeon tower relate to an architect in New York, a designer in Singapore or, in our case, urban planners in Dubai? We believe they allow us to explore forces of coexistence beyond technology, through means of symbiotic equilibrium, and to unpack our evolutionary ecology while re-examining our ongoing relationships with nature.

We believe architecture can play a role in this re-examination. The decay of our ecological systems requires a renewed contract to re-pivot the world to closer points of equilibrium. This argument does not disregard population growth or even the positive implications of urbanisation, but proposes an open-ended questioning of the interdependent nature of our socio‑ecological relationships. The manifestation of our relationship with nature can be seen through our built artefacts; this is not to nostalgically romanticise them, but examine them anew. These include ancient technologies such as the pigeon structures of the Siwa oasis and other structures that include forms of experimentation and conservation in urban and rural landscapes.

There are many efforts towards dealing with climate justice. Architecture for nature can help repair our biosphere, and architects can do more than design for themselves. We are focusing on pigeons. ¹¹

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