Suburban Nomad: Hybrid Igloo, Yurt, Tent + Tipi Home Idea. The juxtaposition of such lifestyle extremes – fixed-space suburban living and nomadic world-travel dwelling – makes for a fascinating conceptual challenge.
It was, in fact, similarly neighboring opposites that gave rise to the idea in the mid of design student living on a lovely nature-filled campus but surrounded by suburbia on all sides. John Paananen took it upon himself to discover what would happen if he were to make over one of the most mobile kinds of traditional buildings – the tipi, with inspiration from its yurt, tent and igloo cousins – turning it into a stationary home with all of the creature comforts to be found in contemporary suburbs. Instead of a portable and organically-evolved design, he chose to force-fit the general shape and style of a conventional nomadic dwelling into the space and settings.
The results? Green Architecture & Building. Our BatchGeo world MAP shows the locations of green building and renewable energy projects featured on Solaripedia.
Nomadic Mongolians, Turkomen, Kazakhs, Uzbeks and Kyrgyz wander and dwell in an area of the Asian steppe that stretches from the Caspian Sea to Mongolia. Living in tent-like dwellings called yurts, these people adapted to conditions of scarcity, using materials at-hand such as animal fur and willow saplings. These yurt structures have a single-room circular plan, created with a lattice frame of willow wands that expand to form the wall but which retract to a compact shape.
Light-weight poles arc towards a ring at the crown to form a roof structure. Tania Cavenecia Torres. Yurt is the more common name for the Mongolian felt tent or Ger and is one of the oldest forms of indigenous shelter still in use.
A Ger consists of a wooden frame, is covered with felt and can be assembled and dismantled in approximately 2 hours. The beautiful photograph above was taken in Mongolia by Dimitri Mundorff, one of the winners of The Lonely Planet photo contest. My husband and I love traveling and may never get to Mongolia but we do get to stay in a Yurt on occasion. When we're unable to travel out of the country we drive up north to Oregon.