For a few thousand years now, yurts have been an exceptional choice for shelter. The round structures were long valued for their stability, simple assembly and portability. Such things mattered, because you could throw the components on a mule and venture to foreign lands to start anew. Today in Western culture, yurts are routinely used for glamping. (That's glamour+camping, the bougie version of roughing it.) Yet, the yurts you find today are not so different than those of long ago.
They feature a lattice-wall construction, stabilized by roof struts that span from the wall to the center crown. It's very effective, but not terribly portable. “The trouble is, in the modern world, most people don’t move around on mules, and traditional yurt designs are heavy, and won’t fit in a car” explains Alec Farmer, founder of Trakke, an outdoors company whose offerings now include a yurt. “That means that, as lovely as they are, they can be a pain to move unless you’ve got a lot of friends and a van.”
For the urban hippy, this is a major drag. That's why Farmer joined his friend, designer Uula Jero, to create the Jero, a modern take on a traditional yurt that’s more than 50 percent lighter and compact enough to fit in a typical car.
Jero is an interesting designer, in that he doesn’t really like stuff. “During my studies, I got a little bit annoyed with the nature of material production in this world,” he says. “Being right in the middle of it as a designer, I had a lot of questions on my mind about the nature of need.”
Around six years ago, Jero decided to ditch his apartment and most of his worldly possessions to move into a yurt in an industrialized part of Cologne, Germany. He wanted to rebuild his life from the ground up, freed from the shackles of possessions. “To see how much I actually require,” he says. The yurt he built was light enough and small enough to be pulled in a bicycle trailer. It was stable, but rudimentary; buildable but full of idiosyncrasies. He lived in it for a year. And Farmer experimented with nomadic urban habitation, living in a 8x8-foot portable micro-house for a stint.
Since then, Jero has started a family. Full-time yurt living proved to be a struggle. A couple years after he moved out, Farmer approached him to design a yurt that would make it easy for anyone to embrace Jero’s simplified lifestyle. The Jero yurt is made of marine plywood, which both designers praise for its low-waste production, inherent strength and ability to withstand harsh environments. While Jero’s last yurt was designed by hand, the new yurt was design on a computer and CNC milled to use as little material as possible.
The traditional latticed wall panels were replaced with 17 sheets of flexible, 5mm-thick plywood that, when placed in a circle, form a rigid structure. “Imagine trying to support a coffee cup on a piece of A4 paper,” says Farmer. “One sheet is very flimsy, but roll it into a cylinder and you could stand the cup on top of it with no problem at all.” If you look inside, you'll see the yurt has an organic shape---18 dowels reach up to the crown and are connected to vertebra, the wood pieces that help stabilize those poles. The vertebra are connected to ribs, the two-pronged pieces that latch to the yurt's walls. Typical yurts of this size (four meters in diameter) have 36 dowels, but the vertebra and ribs allowed the designers to cut that number in half, requiring less wood.
Each component used in the yurt measures 1.2 meters long (the width of a sheet of plywood) and the final weight is around 110 kilograms (less than half the weight of a typical yurt's 200-300 kilograms). Jero says it only takes two people and one to two hours to erect, so that barrier to entry is low. But at £4,500 ($7480), the price tag ain't cheap. Then again, if you're ready to simplify your life, it's really not a bad deal compared to New York City rent.
