Songino Khairkhan, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
For thousands of years, Mongolians have been living in gers – portable structures made of timber, felt and canvas. They are highly evolved designed objects: their circular form is structurally stable and deflects the cold wind; the timber lattice and component parts make it easy to disassemble, move and reassemble in a matter of hours without any tools or fixings. It is a perfect house for the nomads. Yet when this house forms the basic unit of inhabitation for the city, fixed in place, restricted within a plot and bounded by a fence and replicated hundreds of thousands of times it becomes hugely problematic.
The Ger Plug-In fuses the traditional structure of a ger with typical timber house construction. A new truss suspends the ger from above, allowing the centrally placed columns to be removed and the stove to relocate within the thermal mass of a brick wall. This liberates the ger as a free-space providing the family with more options for how they wish to live. The project improves the environmental performance of the household testing low-tech, off-grid systems providing a septic treatment system and WC; water tank and shower; underfloor heating; an electric boiler and a passive solar trombe wall made of black PVC pipes filled with sand. Together these systems act to provide much needed basic infrastructure to the ger and reduce coal consumption.