Occupying the street

The Occupy Frankfurt camp, one of many in the global movement, was reportedly ‘cleared’ by police a few days before the Olympics ended, as I wrote this, and according to Occupy Frankfurt, was successfully relocated. In light of the complex discussion in the previous editorials about solidarity and “clarity, strategy, and purpose” and investigating the accountability of the Occupy Movement, in this editorial, I reflect on my own research on ordinary street occupations in Frankfurt and London, which are not usually associated with media or spectacle.

http://www.occupyfrankfurt.de/2012/08/09/umzug-erfolgreich-camperinnen-bedanken-sich-fur-die-unterstutzung-durch-die-frankfurterinnen/

Read more »

World Planning

When I participated in the World Planning Schools Congress (#wpsc on twitter) in early July 2011, it was not only my first time at a planning conference, but it was also my first time as a delegate of a London university attending a conference in my home town of Perth (unfortunately though, without any financial support for the conference fees). For this congress, The Global Planning Education Network GPEAN had brought together about 500 delegates through The Association of European Schools of Planning, AESOP the Association of Australian and New Zealand Schools of Planning ANZAPS, the South African Planning Schools SAPS and several similar bodies from about thirty countries in total. At a civic reception, I had a personal greeting from Nyungar elder Marie Taylor, my language teacher, and it now was strange but familiar to be at the Perth Convention Centre PCEC looking out over the Swan River (aka the Djerbal Yerrigan) before the opening keynote lecture by Robert Freestone. Resilience and sustainability were pervasive buzzwords in the keynote lecture and the conference, but the discussions of developments such as the thirty cities in China currently building light rail transit systems at the time of the congress provided gravity and scale to the pretext for a world planning congress and a planning education congress.

Read more »

On the Street

At the moment, I am in Germany, doing some research on streets, visiting some streets in Frankfurt and reading about German street design and street users. Taking a break even for a few days from working as an architect and teaching, I have been able to step back and think about Architects for Peace. This editorial aims to address how the streets research might relate to the interests of the Architects for Peace readership. On the anniversary of the 7/7 bombings in London, it is also a reminder of the loss of many innocent citizens' lives in those attacks on transport users; ordinary people like us going about their everyday lives living with global and local tensions.

Fig 1 - A fairly conventional junction in the 'old city' of Frankfurt on the Main, at Münchenerstraße and Elbestraße, in Frankfurt's Railway Station quarter, a mixed use area including a red-light district.

Read more »

Learning from Ulaanbaatar

In May in Vienna, I presented at a symposium on architecture studies in China and Mongolia. Adelaide University’s Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern architecture held such a cross cultural symposium when I was an architecture research masters degree student there, but with my recent year of Mongolian architectural teaching development experience (see arch-peace previously), this year’s Vienna symposium provided an exciting opportunity to meet with central European, Mongolian and Chinese researchers, scholars and architects, in a truly cross cultural and cross-disciplinary meeting with anthropologists, ethnographers, conservationists and architectural historians. The conference was hosted by Vienna University of Technology’s ‘Comparative Architectural Research’ unit, together with Vienna University’s Confucius Institute, and with UNESCO backing. I have previously lived worked and taught in Vienna, and I thought that contributing a story about this conference presentation would make an interesting editorial on cross cultural architectural education for Architects for Peace.

I prepared a report on the architecture teacher training project I had pursued in the peri-urban fringe of Ulaanbaatar in 2007-8, and extended this by reflecting on the work with architecture students at Sheffield University and London Metropolitan University. Sheffield architecture school’s doctoral research group, Lines of Flight,had invited me previously, and I worked with a doctoral planning researcher there to develop the second part of the paper. Supreeya Wungpatcharapon, who is researching participatory processes in urban planning, provided another perspective on the processes developed with Mongolian students, and the resulting conference paper was one which seemed to effectively address the frontier of architectural education in central Asia.

Delegates had come from China, Germany and Austria, and there was a small group from Mongolia. The papers ranged from ethnographical studies of vernacular agricultural building types to analyses of conservation of ancient cities. There was also a very wide range of presenters, from postgraduate students and young professors from Tsinghua University in Beijing to experienced Orient specialists from Pennsylvania, Munich, Würzburg and Hannover.

The session to which I was allocated, ‘Settlement Policy and Cultural Identity in Modern Mongolia’ comprised a paper on the Ethnic Identity of a Mongolian minority group by a Mongolian scholar in Austria, an exhibition of excursion work carried out in Ulaanbaatar tent districts by Austrian students, and my reflections on working with Mongolian architecture students, developing site analysis and brief writing methods.

I briefly presented two live projects – ‘Sanzai Eco-houses’ and ‘Yarmag Children’s Camp’- through which newly trained architects and architecture students aimed to incorporate participatory processes in their design projects, consulting with clients, and exploring options for site analysis.

The first live project, in Sanzai, on the northern periphery of the capital, is a private developer’s proposal to build four houses in an outer suburb, and to market these using an (otherwise dubious and unusual) ecological standard of accommodation, which would be habitable and energy efficient year round, from –30C in winter to 30C in summer. The second live project - another local Mongolian entrepreneur’s proposal - is to develop a nature reserve by introducing a children’s park, hotel and conference centre, in the foothills at the city’s southern edge.

The presentation and the conference session explored possible lessons to be learned from the issues of peri-urban settlement in Mongolia and future work on architecture in development being undertaken in Mongolia and other parts of Asia. A forthcoming research project by Sarah M Bassett on the Ger (the tent Russians called ‘Yurt’) Districts, planned for 2009-10, was also introduced to the conference in the context of sustainability and continuity.














Figure 1 Staff Participation levels in 6 development projects in 2008 – (white = none, grey = moderate, black = full)

First meeting














Figure 2 Staff meeting by G. Cowan















Figure 3 Graduates by G. Cowan. Sanzai - Site Analysis















Figure 4 Sanzai Site Analysis by students photo G Cowan. Learning from Las Vegas















Figure 5 Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi et al 1969).

Combining the Mongolia project review with recent work undertaken with students at London Metropolitan University in the area of participatory design and research, Wungpatcharapon and I discussed some lessons we considered might be learned from Ulaanbaatar. Despite the very different environments and resources, the processes of understanding sites and developing design briefs are not altogether different to those in other places.

Formal study of vernacular architecture in the Mongolian college is minimal. ‘Ger’ and ‘Khiid’ (home and monastery) seem to be regarded as cultural artefacts - rather than science or business which would associate them with ‘architecture’. Most students and teachers at the Mongolian college themselves live in peri-urban informal settlements of Ulaanbaatar, and are intimately familiar with the vernacular architecture of the Ger (Tent) and the self-build cottage tradition. These traditions are not formally taught at the college and they are not used as models for teaching, apparently because they are not aspirational to architecture as a modern and international form of building. The modern rituals of going to the ‘Delguur’ and ‘Tsakh’ (Shop and Market) are not studied as architecture subjects. International cultures of architecture (and to a degree Russian songs, Latin dancing etc) are regarded as ‘models’ but the mode of teaching these is didactic rather than exploratory or discursive.

The style of teaching architecture, particularly in vocational training institutions, and from my experience of tertiary colleges and universities in Mongolia, has traditionally been very didactic, rather than discursive or participatory. Therefore, the idea of collaboration in design studio, of participative site analysis and brainstorming design ideas are all unfamiliar to the Mongolian students I worked with. The experiments – with what in other settings might be fairly conventional participatory architectural studio methods - remind us that these are a developmental aspect of architectural practice which help to overcome cultural and language barriers and enable a more rigorous needs assessment for the development of an architectural design brief.

In peri-urban Ulaanbaatar, the notion of rapid deployment does not seem to be raised in architecture, despite the available model presented by the Ger (tent), which is commonplace, and apparently of little interest to Mongolian architecture students. Permanent buildings seemed to be the aspiration of architectural development, and these often take a long time in construction, spanning the seasons, and necessitating suspension of the building site during the bitterly cold winter.
In reference to the childrens’ camp scheme for Yarmag, and also for the live project for Eco-Houses in Sanzai, the notion of sustainability was used as a mere buzz-word. The need for energy efficient construction was recognised, although the amortisation cost of investing in more expensive design and materials worked against it in the view of students who did not have an understanding of life-cycle costing of buildings.

Participatory practice in architecture is a well-established concept in western, late capitalist architecture, and essential to traditional Mongolian Ger (Tent) building and possibly in monasteries. However, it was not an idea familiar to contemporary Mongolian architecture students I met, who are accustomed to more didactic and expert-led models of creating architecture – effectively, as a foreign European practice. Professors with whom I worked, and who had themselves been schooled in the west, in the European soviet capital Moscow or East Germany for example – tended towards didactic teaching styles and modes of design generation – and instructed students to copy patterns provided by them or from textbooks such as the 1965 Russian edition of Neufert’s Bauentwurfslehre. There was no sense of engagement in the translation and adaptation of foreign architectural ideas in the MCTC college, although Bat-Od’s locally written and produced architecture text book (Arkhitektur, Ulaanbaatar, 2005, 2007) suggests some ways to do this.

In the two live projects in Sanzai and Yarmag, the Mongolian students took similar approaches to developing analyses and briefs, with the advantage of real clients, real budgets and real potential outcomes. What may have been lacking in ‘academic discourse’ was replaced with actual live project experience; visiting the project sites in the north and south peripheries of the city respectively, and undertaking (apparently for the first time) site analysis, compiling design briefs and generating multiple-option original schematics.

The participatory processes employed in the live design projects here cannot be considered as an advanced level of participative practice that allows the end-users of the projects to make decision towards final design proposals. These live projects, however, allowed the Mongolian architecture students to explore alternative ways of developing architectural schemes as well as creating an open learning system in the academic environment. By opening a more dialogical space of learning together amongst teachers, students and clients (the users), the experience may encourage the students to develop alternative architecture processes and schemes that are appropriate to the Mongolian context, rather than those inspired by foreign or western styles of architectural design.

Conclusion
During the development of the Mongolia teaching work since 2007, there have been many supporters and correspondents who have taken part in critique and encouragement of the work. Colleagues undertook work in many diverse disciplines. For example, my partner Clare Hill undertook work in the textile development sector in Ulaanbaatar and Erdenet, and many other VSO colleagues and local non-government organisations collaborated on various development initiatives. Of many local and international scholars and development workers with whom I discussed developing various initiatives, an art curator and an anthropologist I met in Ulaanbaatar are keen to collaborate on a book, and the previously mentioned Chicago architect-researcher Sarah M Bassett will conduct a project on ‘Transitional Architecture’ in 2009-2010, and invites contact, at sarahmbassett@gmail.com, in regard to ongoing architecture development work in peri-urban Ulaanbaatar.

The work ‘Nomadologist in Ulaanbaatar’ 2007-2008, of an ‘architect teacher trainer’ at a Construction College, was reported in a previous article for Architects for Peace. The conference paper showed what Supreeya Wungpatcharapon and I and students reflected upon as ways of ‘Learning from Ulaanbaatar’, not only in terms of observing the resource limitations and shortcomings relative to our preconceptions, but also the potential of using the studio to develop constructive and open design processes. By reflecting on the training and live projects, and subsequent discussions about the outcomes at architecture schools in the UK, some of the insights on processes and methods can be taken from working in the rapidly changing, resource-poor environment of peri-urban Ulaanbaatar.

Under Construction - New Architecture School















Figure 6 Photo G. Cowan May 2008.




Note 1- Refer to Blog Entry - Site Analysis; initial discussion(http://nomadologist-nomadology.blogspot.com/2008/06/site-analysis-initial-discussion.html dated Sunday, June 29, 2008) photos http://www.flickr.com/groups/1025839@N24/

Note 2 - Refer to Blog Entry - Essential Design Skills(http://nomadologist-nomadology.blogspot.com/2008/06/essential-skills.html dated Wednesday, June 25, 2008)

General Photo Pool:
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/nomadologist/2543151893/in/set-72157602065424017
- higher resolution images available on request from mailto: gregory@cowan.com

References:
- More about the symposium “Along the Great Wall”: http://baugeschichte.tuwien.ac.at/abk/symposium-china-mongolei/index_dt_mauersymp.html
- Participatory Techniques: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1025839@N24/
- Nomadologist blog - http://nomadologist-nomadology.blogspot.com/
- Sheffield University - Lines of Flight - PhD researchers group http://linesofflight.wordpress.com/
- London Met MA Architecture of Rapid Change Scarce Resources http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/pgprospectus/courses/architecture-of-scarce-resources.cfm
- Nomad Research http://www.innerasiaresearch.org/caroline_humphrey.htm
- Sarah Bassett http://www.elkrapidsnews.com/elk-rapids-news-features.php#ER
- Homepage - http://gregorycowan.blogspot.com/ (comments welcome)

development architecture, Mongolian style

The May editorial is comprised of some of my reflections on development work which may be of interest to - and prompt discussion among - AfP readers. I am now in the ninth month of a placement in a Mongolian Construction College in a poor peri-urban area. I have extended this piece based on a response from Ceridwen Owen, below, and welcome further discussion.


My role as 'architect teacher trainer' in Ulaanbaatar is broad; to develop the architecture staff, students, curriculum and profession. The work is part of a VSO project to develop secure livelihoods, and aims to develop construction jobs, which would help more Mongolians to live above the poverty line. (see UNESCO report). Mongolia’s economy, in transition since 1992 from socialism, has been developing, but environmental problems, unemployment, poor literacy, alcohol abuse, and often inadequate sanitation and infrastructure all remain as large problems for the construction sector. Construction professionals and teachers however, seem ill-prepared - or disinclined - to tackle these medium and long-term issues. One of the 'developmental' attractions of the project is that I am also able to work flexibly with stakeholders - without a full load of formal teaching hours, which would potentially only do a Mongolian construction teacher out of their job. Instead I try to work side-by side with teachers, despite the considerable language and resource challenges.

There are very few printed or institutional resources for architectural education available in the Mongolian language, while literacy problems and poor teaching facilities also provide barriers to teaching and learning. The Russian materials and teaching methods commonly used between 1924 and 1989 are now particularly outdated, and English and German language materials (Chinese language materials seem to be culturally taboo) are often even more inaccessible, both financially and linguistically. A quotation from 1989 I read today was a sobering reminder of the after-effects of the Soviet 20th century.

"'They told us we lived in a socialist paradise', the worker said bitterly. 'But the soviets dumped their obsolete equipment on us, and every one of them lorded it over us as experts. Even the Russian truck drivers were experts - who got paid three times more.'" ('Ulan Bator May 1989' (sic) in Jasper Becker 1992 The Lost Country; Mongolia Revealed )

Becker's report of conditions of gaols in 1989 was horrifying. But also the demotivation and aid dependency of organisation still in transition, remains worrying. As a 'foreign expert' and volunteer, I constantly feel I need to draw attention to developing the capacity of local people; teachers, architects, students. Not just "telling about my experience" but trying to develop with people in collaboration.

Yesterday, with a translator, I asked a second year group what they had learned in first year. "The column, the corinthian column." Was it relevant in Mongolia? Students need to learn about art and design, they said. Later, some students expressed concern about the calculations necessary in building technology lessons, and the lack of 'artistic freedom'. They also wanted to know about the pathways to qualification in foreign countries. I assured them that some concerns about the ability of their teachers to "deliver" were also percieved by students in other countries. We discussed some projects, drawn, surrounded by lush vegetation in empty landscapes, but actually meant to be in cities.

The architectural community of this country, which has been in transition from communism since 1992, seems somewhat disconnected from world standards and communication. The elusive Arkitektorjdiin Kholboo (Mongolian Association of Architects) seems to be “dormant”. Gradually the Mongolian Architecture page on Wikipedia is being improved. It is in English, inaccessible to those students mentioned above.

Yet I believe some of the work I have undertaken (what VSO calls skill sharing) has developed the confidence and literacy of architecture teaching staff. Since I have been training here, two teachers have moved on to better-paid jobs. The curriculum is rarely referred to consciously; although it remains on file “at the Ministry”, teachers apparently measure student progress largely by perseverance. I try to demystify the odea of curriculum development.

Soon, the first cohort of diploma students will complete their fourth year. Of these, none to whom I have spoken seems to have been remotely aware of 'the' one Mongolian architecture textbook (Bat-Od, 2005, 2007), let alone basic texts used internationally, like FDK Ching’s ‘Form, Space and Order’, the US Architectural Graphic Standards, or Neufert’s ‘Architects’ Data’ (in 18 languages). Building and planning codes may exist, but are only vaguely known, and seem to be poorly controlled. Physical accessibility to buildings and streets for people without disabilities is difficult enough, but independent living for people with disabilities is almost unheard-of. I have worked with the Mongolian Wheelchairs Citizens, but the teachers have no time or interest. Small steps.

On the other hand, potential exists for future development in the secondary and tertiary Ger districts, (informal settlements beyond those scheduled for replacement by apartments), as well as in the much anticipated new social housing, and in commercial development, so often 'outsourced' to foreign experts and cheap Chinese labour.

On the positive side, there is life in Mongolia beyond work. The apparently barren and dirty environment is not yet as badly polluted as many places, and there are some freedoms in the nomadic tradition. Many people seem to enjoy more time with their families and better access to locally grown food than in the UK. Teachers work long hours, but do not seem stressed. They are concerned about air quality - comparable with London's before the Clean Air Act of 1956 - and about transport congestion, in the oversubscribed capital. Many people I meet would like to contribute to Mongolia’s development without having to go abroad, as so many young people and absent fathers have done in order to earn more money. Mongolians love their culture and customs, and many are rediscovering indigenous music, history, arts, medicine and even calligraphy.

As I prepare for the final few months of the placement and set objectives for the remaining work, I am increasingly comparing this place with others. My young Australian niece, on seeing my photo of a Ger on a verge, asked, "What happens if you put your house on the footpath? No-one can get past.."

As I walk to work I see people collecting their water and I think of her comment upon seeing the Ger district with its urbanscape of felt rooves. "What is that, a circus or something?"

Greg Cowan

Architects for Peace, May 2008

Hi Greg,

Thanks for your editorial - what an incredible experience!

As someone also working in tertiary education in architecture it is particularly interesting for me. I'd love to know more about the architecture school - how long has it been in existence? How many students? Is the course still modeled on the Russian system? What does the curriculum consist of - any similarities to the Australian model? What are your key objectives for your last few months there and will anyone be continuing in your position after you leave? At the University of Tasmania we work on a project with fourth year students every year based in some remote and unfamiliar context to them (not necessarily a developing nation, but that is frequently the case). Might be interesting to do something as a collaborative student project in the future?!

I had a look at the Wikipedia page for Mongolian architecture and it seemed to relate primarily to the traditional yurt. Do you have any references/names for contemporary Mongolian architecture/architects? What does 'the' one Mongolian architecture textbook contain? How many of the teachers at the school are actively practicing architecture as well? It is encouraging that you say that many students are interested in continuing to work in Mongolia on graduation rather than move to more lucrative jobs overseas. Nevertheless, I can appreciate how difficult it is to develop a local architectural culture without access to good resources (both global and local) that are accessible both physically and in language. Obviously not a problem that can be 'solved' overnight, but with a long term vision towards this end it seems that at least first positive steps are being taken.

Is there much work that focusses on understanding and documenting the traditional buildings and spatial practices of the Mongolian people? As an aside, there is an excellent organisation in India called the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation built around Balkrishna Doshi's architecture practice in India. They have done an incredible amount of research into local vernacular buildings such as the pols in Ahmedebad as well as investigating in detail the use of space in urban slums through a series of beautifully illustrated books.

I hope we will be able to see more of your work over there when you return through the Words forum at Architects for Peace.

Regards, Ceridwen

Dear Ceridwen

Thanks for your response to the editorial - I will respond here briefly and update the blog. This college started operating in 2004 as a vocational college and skills training centre with help from GTZ (German Agency for Technical Cooperation) and with about six hundred students and forty staff is now working towards producing its first architecture graduates, with four year diplomas. The college is a privately funded one, established with the aim of addressing the undersupply of skilled Mongolian workers in the construction sector. In the case of this partnership, VSO is specifically addressing the vulnerable occupants of Ulaanbaatar’s peri-urban areas (informal settlements), where many people have relocated in the last few years to find urban work after the demise of their rural / herding businesses, due to climate and other factors. Although it will move to emphasise rural centres in future, the work is part the Secure Livehoods programme in Mongolia, which is training and capacity building as part of the ongoing transition from socialism to market capitalism.

Similarities
There are few similarities to Australian curricula. I was familiar with the latter as a lecturer and examiner with the Architects Accreditation Council in Australia (and their National Programme of Assessment – NprA). Here at CTC, there is a ‘foundation studies area’ and theory and practice streams running through the degree; these ostensibly cover areas such as history and culture, building technology and design. As you suggested, the basis is ‘Russian’ insofar as the curriculum model has been adopted apparently unchanged based on what senior teachers studied under the Russian and state system – building engineering - and then filed away out of sight and out of mind at the Ministry of Education. My interest is to encourage ownership of the curriculum among staff in order that they may initiate ongoing processes of curriculum review.

Links
The international links are very limited, even with Russian colleges and universities, although the University of Science and Technology architecture degree has some forms of cooperation with Japan, Korea and Austria. Vienna University of Technology’s faculty for the study of ‘Non-European architectures’ has established some basic cooperation and there have been some staff exchanges in Europe. There appears to be little encouragement from the profession however, beyond the participation of dedicated semi-volunteer architect-academics.

Wikipedia and Research
As mentioned, the English language Wikipedia page is in draft form, but focuses primarily on history and the traditional Ger (Russian – Yurt). Research such as that I saw at B V Doshi’s Vastu-Shilpa Foundation in Ahmedabad on vernacular and informal architecture forms is aspired to by someone like Purev-Erdene Ershuu. Ershuu is chair of the Centre for Architecture and Design Research at the Mongolian University of Science and Technology, and sits on the Mongolian Architects Association steering committee, however despite the support of international NGOs JAICA and KOICA and Professor Erich Lehner’s above mentioned Viennese Institute, he appears to be almost alone in his work. One hopes that the resources can be developed, and that even recent local literature like A. Bat Od’s 2007 “Architecture..”
(Mongolian) will be noticed. The latter book comprises four sections – the first section, drawing, scale, measurement and technical information systems; second section, practice, sources of planning, building elements, and dimensioning standards; thirdly, classifying housing building types, analysed in detail (from Le Corbusier to SOM, Hejduk, Niemeyer, and Bart Prince); and fourthly, energy efficiency and technical details of materials.

Although it cannot be comprehensive, this book in Mongolian is more transparent to me than any of the curriculum notes or hand-written private teaching outlines I have seen here. In my remaining time at the college, it is one of my aims to pursue a process of developing teaching outlines and techniques. Importantly I will aim to inspire interest in the content and delivery of lessons, by our undervalued and underpaid teachers, who often spread their time thinly between teaching and construction.

Regards, Greg

Mongolia's first ever private Construction Technology College

I am working at what is reported to be Mongolia's first ever private Construction Technology College, in an effort to improve the situation for professional architectural education here. Uniquely for my long established NGO, Voluntary Service Overseas, this posting sets out to share architectural education skills, in order to create sustainable livelihoods and economic development in the rapidly changing construction industry here.

The library in this two-year old school is relatively newly established, and is an example of how different things are here. Part of the problem is the lack of available literature. Of about thirty books on the shelf dedicated to architecture, only three small A5 titles are in Mongolian. These are basic technical drawing textbooks, published about 1995. Very few of the books seem to be dated from after Mongolia's independence in 1992. About twenty of the substantial bound volumes about architecture are in Russian, and there are quite a lot of old professional journals also in Russian. There are several books and magazines in Japanese and Chinese, and none in English or German.

fig.1 teaching tool

There is one specialist book on English for builders and architects. (Translated in 2006 by Nomuundari, Bolor and Enebish from a Russian book by Bezruchko.) There are no books on Mongolian architecture and the one Russian title on Mongolian Architecture I have seen (in a shop at the Choijin Lama Temple) is not in the school's collection.

Fig.2 Souvenirs, State Department Store; State Circus (blue roof) through window in the distance

Our college director promises a list of new books due in the near future, but the list of titles is not available to see. There is no catalogue of the books and the librarian's computer is not attached to a network or printer. She writes the names and numbers of books loaned on the borrower's card.

One of the most potentially practical tites on the shelf is the two part handbook "Stroitelbnoe Projektirobanie" which is the Russian 1965 equivalent of a Neufert's Architect Handbook or an AJ Metric handbook. No contemporary equivalent is said to be available, but I will be interested to see what practitioners in architects offices are using for architects data.

Daily life here is not quite as clockwork as many architecture schools in the minority world where I taught previously. Classrooms have blackboards but few staff use illustrations when teaching design. There are good computer labs, the crowded computers are virus ridden. The drawing studio is full of still life pencil drawings of plaster cast heads. Most of the students here live in the peri-urban ger districts, the informal settlements where people have settled in gers (yurts) and shacks. Electricity is reticulated informally, and water comes by bucket or jerry can from wells and community tanks along unsealed roads. These areas have grown considerably in the last few years after harsh winters decimated livestock herds and many nomads moved to the city. However, the students are very keen to learn. Their practical training is like an apprenticeship and is an important part of the funding model for the private education.

Fig.3

I hope to be able to achieve something helpful over the coming year and welcome readers and correspondents to my blog at http://www.nomadologist-nomadology.blogspot.com/ or via http://www.gregory.cowan.com/


Gregory Cowan
Mongolia
Architects for Peace, October 2007

--------------

See photos "walk to work": http://flickr.com/photos/nomadologist/sets/72157602236377955/

London to Ulaanbataar

In 2003 I migrated - temporarily- from Perth, the world’s most isolated city, to one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities, London. After ten years teaching architecture in Perth and Kuala Lumpur, I was taking a career break. I had travelled in Europe, having spent three years working as an architect in Austria, but it took time to appreciate London, and l have gradually immersed myself in the city.

Visits to architecture students and graduates around the UK have made my job exciting, and I have developed newsletters and awards with this dispersed community, spread among forty-one universities. Communication with and travel to some of the ten thousand people in this community have been made easier with the UK infrastructure and technology. I do most of my travel by train and bicycle. My partner and I have been able to squeeze domestically and financially into a Georgian studio flat in central London, enabling us to live a short cycle away from work, within the congestion charging zone. So many people around us spend an hour or more, morning and evening, commuting on underground and suburban trains. We have also developed a fondness for the community in our street, which after enduring the nearby bombings in 2005, has resurrected the decade-long dormant tradition of a summer street party.

After the Tsunami, the debates about architectural education and international work escalated among students, involving UK groups Architects for Aid, Architecture Sans Frontieres and Architecture for Humanity. Emergency response and international development processes might be expected to have value in educating architects, and in improving their co-operations with others. But how could these broad interests be harnessed to effect training and practical change? Could international development processes even help with more sustainable planning the 2012 Olympics and Lea Valley regeneration?

In late 2006 I noticed - amid chuckles in the office - that an ‘architecture teacher trainer’ in Mongolia was sought by the organisation Voluntary Service Overseas VSO, and I later successfully applied for the voluntary post. Beginning in August in Ulaanbaatar, I will be based at CTC, an independent construction college working in conjunction with training facilities on several building sites. I am looking forward to learning more about the purposes of architecture and architectural education in Mongolia, where as they have for the last thousand years - the majority of the population still live in the traditional dwelling, the circular felt tent called the ‘Ger’.

Gregory Cowan
Architects for Peace, April 2007


Photograph by: Denny Walther
www.gregory.cowan.com
www.gregory.cowan.com/mongolia
www.gregory.cowan.com/nomad