After-Lives of the Mongolian Yurt

Abstract

The Mongolian yurt, now abandoned as a dwelling in much of Inner Mongolia (China), has an after-life in architecture, especially in public buildings in cities. We discuss the case of a failed tourist camp, constructed of brick ‘yurts’, which was built to exploit the exoticism of the Mongolian culture for the Han Chinese. This is an example of skeuopmorphic architecture, with deliberate slippage between the original and the copy, and we describe how this situation gives rise to various symbolic interpretations of the ‘yurts’. It is argued that, despite certain similarities with post-modern vernaculars (e.g. Las Vegas), the political and ethnically confrontational situation in China means that the imitation ‘yurts’ do not in fact constitute a vernacular.