The original premise of the Mongolian yurt was that it was to
be somewhat portable. While the Mongols
lived in their yurts for a substantial part of the year, when the dead of
winter hit in the high Himalayas, these semi-nomadic people moved lower down
the mountains, packing their felt, skin and pole –framed homes with them on
carts. They were hardly light enough to
transport by hand or skid. Today, we
build abridged and hybridized versions of these very early homes, but we have
lost much of the portability of the original ger.
One of the reasons is that we have a great deal of lattice
framing to handle. While the lattice is
lightweight, the assembly and disassembly of the frame is time consuming. Along with that impediment to mobility, the
roof ring also requires more than one person to erect and install, and the
layering of the outer skins requires a delicate balance of adjustment and
readjustment. If the bubble insulation is used, this provides an additional
round of stretching and securing into place, most often requiring an extra set
of hands.
The semi-solid wall yurt provides much of the benefit of the
solid wall yurt, while actually decreasing the weight of conventional flexible
walled designs. At the same time, the
insulative value of the rigid insulation that forms the core of each solid
panel provides a protection against temperature fluctuations from hot to cool.
This design has been found to provide a comfortable environment when the
outside temperature varies from plus 35C to minus 25C – a full 60C (108F)
variation. The wall design can support a
roof load considerably greater than that of flexible lattice designs, too.
However, one of the primary advantages of this semi-solid
wall system is that it can be erected in less than 2 hours and broken down into
components in less than one, with only one person required for the tasks. That makes it ideal for medium-term camping,
for setup in summer months and storage in winter (making it an optimal lakeside
guest house), and for portability.
Although the unit requires more storage space than a flexible wall yurt,
a sixteen-foot diameter yurt can easily be transported in the back of a
half-ton truck, or on a small utility trailer, as its weight does not exceed
200 pounds (excluding floor and joist system).
A portable yurt may seem unnecessary for most applications,
since they often are set up and remain in place. However, given that almost no flexible wall
yurts meet engineering standards that will allow them to be substituted as
permanent, permitted structures in zoned or code-controlled areas, the only way
to bypass permanent home rules is to be able to erect and disassemble the units
rapidly. This gives them an exemption as
temporary structures, similar to portable garages. With a 90-day window common for these
buildings, the semi-solid wall yurt provides the capacity to build and
de-construct the unit rapidly, allowing them to qualify for use in zoned areas.
