The Construction of a Yurt (1995)
pbm.com
pbm.com
After reading it, I ended up in a Google Images rabbit hole looking at different kinds of Yurts.
The alternative is in consumer mode, where you sit and consume anything that shows up on the conveyor belt of feeds, wondering why things aren't as good these days.
>"We managed to get about 9 lathes out of each 2x4 on average (sometimes 10, sometimes only 8). Remember, in planning for this, that the saw blade has thickness, and that all the sawdust has to come from somewhere."
Dimensional lumber is anything but that. I once needed to rip down a stack of 2"x6" lumber to the same width. Some pieces would run through the saw without cutting anything off, others would leave a 1/4" strip of scrap. Take into account the kerf and there was almost a 1/2" difference between some pieces.
Well worth losing an afternoon exploring.
https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/historyculture/indian-village...
https://github.com/oxalorg/sakura
`<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/sakura.css/css/sakura.css" type="text/css">`
I tried sakura just now on a few of my 1990s webpages, and it trashes a lot of my list-and-table-based formatting. Maybe it works well for other pages, but not mine.
Still too wide? No problem! Hit "C-t s" again and you get another vertical split.
"c-t r" will undo the last split and "c-t q" will undo them all.
As you mention an idea of serious sustainability -- which is surely an important concept at this time -- what is it about holidaying or even living in yurts that you find non sustainable?
Essentially my point is that this sort of 'yurt living' (in an environmentalist context, not a holidaying context) is promoted as part of the, say, permaculture lifestyle - let's all get a few acres of land, grow our own potatoes and lettuce, and make do with whatever primitive methods we had 100 years ago. Completely ignoring aggregate level ecosystem service accounting, or even the basic observation that for most people living in a tent is not acceptable. So it's more a remark on the lifestyle view on sustainability that is associated with 'living in a yurt' than actually living in a yurt (or similar 'alternative dwelling') itself. 'Living in a yurt' isn't just 'I don't live in a house'; it means 'living without running water, sewer systems, insulation or efficient heating in very low population density systems, with a focus on self-sufficiency, in 'connection' with the land and in small-community social contexts.
The glamour and possibilities of an intimate experience with natural materials and settings is part and parcel of cultural and technological development towards the goal of mass coexistence with natural systems, through a variety of places and architectures.
Even ignoring the benefit of investing attention and sense of identity in biophillic aesthetic and ideology, the typical enthusiast of yurt living or similar is at this stage no less ecologically viable than the rest of us - who are currently occupying space and resources and polluting directly and indirectly plenty.
Rural biodegradeable cabin dwellers might not be able to live quite as eco-lightly as urban dwellers might be able someday in a specially arranged ecologically optimised municipality, but such optimised municipalities dont exist yet.
Experience reveals we dont all benefit from living with plumbed water and toilets -all of the time. Poverty is more complex than the presence or absence of such facilities.
The history and development of permaculture technology does not deserve special cynicism and is never criticised with representative data.
I've seen the glamping sites with yurts in the lake district before, but I assumed they're few and far between. Guess I was wrong.
https://coolcamping.com/glamping/yurts
This simplicity and effectiveness is why it is ancient yet still used now.
I think it turned out nicely - http://instagram.com/barefootyurtlife/
(scroll back a bit through that IG)
You can buy as little or as much of the kit as you want - i.e. siding for the outside, flooring, etc.
Primarily, yurts have to be larger. They need to accommodate entire families and their livestock in harsh winter storms. That can be keeping upwards of several dozen bodies alive in some of the worst weather on the planet. Secondly, they also have to manage the searing summer temperatures/sunlight of the southern deserts, along with incredibly high wind loads. Thirdly, they have to be repairable with the very few natural resources available in rural Mongolia.
That said, regular tents probably could learn from them. Yurts are incredibly modular and flexible designs. You can combine multiple yurts into one larger one, or use them in very different environments. They're also fairly low impact, with the primary damage to the ground being sunlight deprivation and foot traffic. I doubt the design itself could be adapted to backpacking very well though. It's just fundamentally a bit overengineered for what campers require.
Both of the fabric yurts pack down to more convenient shapes (re: they can fit in more kinds of vehicles and spaces), particularly for the larger amount of enclosed volume. but they're much heavier. It would be a hard job to put them up solo both without tools (aka, ladders) but, I think, doable. They stay decently cool / warm inside, and are decently weather-sealed. They have many more parts and kinds of parts. Every part is completely reusable. I imagine that building one from scratch is a substantial endeavor. Has to be put away dry and is moderately involved to clean.
Hexayurts are a PITA to transpo / store (8ft x 4+ft x N inches, can't be bent, etc), but weight nothing. You can expand the design to be pretty huge on the inside, but it gets increasingly harder to put up. They're easy-ish to modify (you can re-use parts to make one of a different size) and multiple ones can very easily be assembled into larger "complexes". They have amazing isolation from the elements (when put up correctly). You can put the small ones up with minimal help, but it's hard to put the large ones up without many hands. Overall, tho, they're less work to put up. But, they also consume some materials (the tape is consumed). However, you can put together "from scratch" pretty easily, can be stored basically anywhere, and you clean it with a hose.
There's also some interesting aesthetic considerations - you can pain a hexayurt, but fabric is inherently nice; one flashlight can light up the entire interior of a yurt, etc.
If I had to live in something forever I'd go with a Mongolian yurt, but if I had to outfit a refugee camp I'd definitely go with the hexayurts.
15 years ago I would've put it down to lack of understanding how to write CSS etc. But today it's almost impossible to make a website that doesn't have at least _some_ styling (when using site builders like Squarespace, Wix, etc).
Edit: Turns out this site is from 1994 (see http://www.pbm.com/). How are you guys finding these ancient sites? :P
Look, I realise now it's a site from 1994, I'm just astounded by the number of people that seem to think this design is still acceptable by today's standards and that I'm some sort of new-age hipster for suggesting otherwise.
Spending time perusing knowledge sites other than the latest JS framework tutorial does tend to produce sharing of this kind.