“All the Island is a City, and All the City an Island”: Suakin’s Coral Architecture Under Ottoman Rule


Alican Taylan (Cornell University)


Suakin, an entirely coral-built port city on the Red Sea, developed architecturally under Ottoman rule in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Turkish houses and mosques used rough-cut blocks of coral taken from the seabed or gathered along the shore. Because coral is porous and brittle, builders encased exterior walls in plaster and combined coral with timber. Wooden members were keyed through walls and arches to add tensile capacity and accommodate settlement, improving performance under heat, salt, and humidity. Projecting wooden roshans regulated light, air, and privacy, and mitigated heat retention in coral masonry, producing a material and spatial system calibrated to the climate. This hybrid—coral skeletons stabilized by plaster and stitched with wood—treated once-living matter as an architectural body that required ongoing care. At the urban scale, coral remained paramount to the city’s development: the reef formations around the island created a sheltered anchorage and helped attract long-distance trade; early Portuguese accounts described Suakin as a prosperous port akin to Lisbon.
Ottoman architecture in Suakin was simultaneously imperial and local. It was designed as the empire’s regional port while its forms and techniques were directly informed by the properties and limits of the reef ecology that framed the harbor. In the nineteenth century, however, these relations shifted. No longer under Ottoman rule, Egyptian-period buildings favored squared coral that was left exposed, and the integration of keyed timber was reduced, preferring imported architectural elements, resulting in weaker, faster-decaying walls.
Drawing on unpublished archival material from the Greenlaw collection at the Sudan Archaeological Research Society and the Sudan Archives at Durham University, this presentation documents Suakin’s premodern architectural practices and reassesses the city’s place within the environmental, imperial, and material history of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean worlds.

Transforming Landscapes, Powering the Nation: Energy Monuments in Independent India


Bérénice Girard (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development)





 The development of low-carbon energy sources such as wind and solar is often described in transformative terms — as part of an “energy transition” or even of a solar or wind “revolution.” This paper contributes to critical debates on this narrative by examining both the transformations brought about by low-carbon energy development and the continuities it maintains with existing energy regimes. Drawing on a comparative study of two types of large-scale energy infrastructures in India at different periods — the construction of large dams in the decades following Independence and the development of solar parks today — the paper explores how both are embedded in similar aesthetic, technical, and political frameworks. It analyzes how large dams and solar parks are shaped by an aesthetic of gigantism and by mapping and quantification techniques that render space legible and available for development. While both infrastructures transform landscapes and local ecologies, many of their socio-environmental consequences are rendered invisible through diverse discursive and bureaucratic mechanisms. Through this comparison, the paper shows that while low-carbon energy infrastructures contribute to climate mitigation, they often reproduce the logics of existing energy regimes, such as top-down technocratic planning and territorial control.