Bill Coperthwaite: Yurt Builder Extraordinaire

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While I was mulling over these doubts, I suddenly realized that I had my project set up backward. I saw that what we really need are communities dedicated to encouraging the optimal growth of all people . . . children or adults. If you need a school in such a community, you build one . . . but the community remains primary and the school a spinoff, not the other way around.

At the same time, I'd been thinking about how to live simply, close to the realities of life . . . and about the need for knowledge that gives people like me the options from which to create our own patterns. Here was a chance for research and study that would be valuable, and fun too! I realized, moreover, that I had a vested interest in getting more people to work on the information that would help me design a better life, and also that my knowledge was valuable to others who wanted — as I did — to live more simply. Obviously, collecting data wasn't enough . . . we'd need to experiment with the information and publish the results for the use of others. So I got the idea of forming a community to work on these lines.

Then I had to figure out how such a community could raise its own food, construct its own buildings and provide itself with the cash it needed. Fortunately, at about that time my yurt research started catching people's interest and plans for these buildings began to sell. Since the yurt was a graphic symbol of the blending of old folk knowledge with modern experience — and since the design was bringing in some income to support more work of the same kind — it seemed good to call our community the Yurt Foundation.

PLOWBOY: How did you happen to start experimenting with yurts?

COPERTHWAITE: Well, to begin with, the idea of a round living space was very appealing to me and I wanted to design a version that would be simple to construct. The attraction, though, wasn't just the building itself — for example, I don't claim that a yurt is necessarily better than a log cabin, which can also be a very fine structure — but the fact that the yurt seemed to embody several ideas that are important to me.

First, because I wanted to transmit folk knowledge to help my contemporaries design a better society, I liked the idea of working with an ancient principle to design a modern structure using modern materials.

The yurt also has another very important value for me, as an example of the variety of directions we can take. We aren't limited to square corners in construction, and we shouldn't be restricted in our thinking, either . . . some people miss that symbolic point.

Then, too, I'm excited about the yurt because it provides a chance to work on something really new, with plenty of possibilities for experiment on the design. And in the long run, the value of that design is going to be that you and I and anyone who wants to can use it. That's another principle that the yurt expresses for me: The structure's simplicity lets the builder become personally involved in creating his own shelter.

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