YURTS ... NEW

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The concept proved sound when we built the first conical yurt , in College, Alaska at the home of Niilo Koponen, in the spring of 1967. It was a delightful structure both to build and to live in. It came closer to the ideal of uniting skin and skeleton from straight wooden members than any structure known to me. It proved easy to erect and three people put up the walls and roof in seven hours. Although I was pleased with the new structure in many ways, I felt that cutting the tongue and groove the tapered boards still required too much skill for the average person.

I continued to analyse the yurt design until, one day, it occurred red to me that there was no need to tongue and groove the boards nor to taper the wall members. I had been limiting my thinking to the structural terms of liquid containers that needed to be forced together with bands to keep them from leaking. But there was no liquid pressure in the yurt. Its outward thrust and stability came from the roof. The walls could be tapered boards, overlapped for ease of nailing, and lapped more the bottom than at the top to produce the sloping wall.

The complicated tongue and grooved, tapered boards of the roof were eliminated by the folded roof that is to be seen on the yurts in the photos that accompany this article. The roof requires power equipment in its construction only for the ripping of the boards. They are then nailed at right angles to one another. This makes both a simpler roof structure and an immensely stronger one as well. A by-product of this design is the ring of triangular windows fitted under the eaves. Although sufficient light comes in through the central skylight, the quality of light entering through the peripheral windows adds greatly to the attractiveness of the structure.

The first yurt of this design was built at the home of Randolph Brown in Westwood, Massachusetts in the fall of 1968. Shortly after this came the opportunity to build the first Harvard yurt which was basically the same structure with some changes in proportion. Used as a study and seminar room in 1968-69, it received more attention than any of the contemporary yurts up until that time, partially due to its location on the Harvard Graduate School of Education campus. The structure's attractiveness, uniqueness and simplicity drew people to it. It was this yurt that prompted the Study-Travel-Community people to build their own school.

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