Ger Plug-In 3.0
GER PLUG-IN 3.0
District Development Unit
ARCHITECTS
District Development Unit
LEAD ARCHITECTS
Joshau Bolchover (Director), Jersey Poon (Project Lead)
PROJECT TEAM
Minjmaa Enkhbat
IMPLEMENTATION PARTNER
Energy Efficient Design Build Llc (Dulguun Batkhishig And Erdembileg Nemekhbaatar)
COMMUNITY PARTNER
Gerhub Ngo (Uurtsaikh Sangi, Temuulen Enkhbat)
AREA
100 m²
YEAR
2023
LOCATION
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
CATEGORY
Houses
English description provided by the architects.
Over 840,000 people live in the ger districts of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, sprawling districts of gers (traditional felt tents) and self-built houses.
Most households use an average of 4.1 tons of coal or coke briquettes for heating each winter as temperatures drop below -30°C.
There is no sewage or sanitation infrastructure: 95% of residents use pit latrines, 1% have access to piped water, and air pollution is extremely debilitating to health.
The Ger Plug-In 3.0 is an energy-efficient house that provides the ger with everything it does not have – access to sanitation, water, and electric heating.
The Plug-In is designed to be built incrementally, residents can connect their existing ger to an infrastructural core at a low price, then extend with living and sleeping spaces when they have the financial capacity to do so.
The project addresses challenges facing Mongolians as they transition from a traditional nomadic to a sedentary urban lifestyle.
The Plug-in 3.0 harnesses the advantages of the ger as an affordable house and upgrades its performance to reduce energy use by 36% compared to local regulations and reduce CO2 emissions by 7.8 tons compared to a self-built house using coal.
Ger Plug-In 3.0 is the result of over 10 years of research and prototyping to design a scalable housing product that qualifies for green mortgages offered by national banks.
The aim is to initiate a new building block for the city that maintains the cultural significance of the ger but can pivot development towards a more sustainable future.
