Building the Anti Yurt: Yacademy Alumnus Bokeikhan Reimagines a Kazakh Tradition

By Bokeikhan Kamza, Alumnus of Wood Architecture 2024

Hello, Bokeikhan, and thank you for taking the time to answer these questions. We’d like to start by asking what happened after you attended the Wood Architecture course at Yacademy in 2024.

The Wood Architecture course at Yacademy was an important turning point in the way I approached architecture.

Before the course, I was primarily thinking about architecture through form, space and concept. At Yacademy, I became much more interested in what happens after an idea is designed: how materials behave, how structures are assembled, how joints work, and how a digital idea can eventually become a physical object.

I was selected among the top 20 students of the Yacademy Wood Architecture program, and the experience encouraged me to continue exploring the relationship between traditional forms, timber construction, and contemporary fabrication.

One of the projects that grew from this interest was ŞENBER Wooden Tent, a modular wooden pavilion inspired by the Kazakh yurt. We explored a system based on individual timber elements and traditional Chidori joints, without conventional metal fasteners. The project later received six awards and recognitions in Kazakhstan and Russia.

I would not say that Corten Yurt was a direct continuation of Yacademy. There were many other projects and experiments in between. But there was a common thread: I became increasingly interested in how architecture can move from an idea into something physical and buildable.

Over the past five years, I have worked on around 30 projects. Only three won competitions, and Corten Yurt became the first one to go all the way from competition concept to full realization.

That experience changed the way I see architecture.

We know that you participated in the development of the first Kazakh yurt ever realized for the 2026 Archstoyanie Festival in Nikola-Lenivets: would you mind telling us about this festival and the project? What is the concept behind it? What role did you play in bringing it to life? What message do you think it conveys, being the first Kazakh yurt to be built for this event?

Archstoyanie is a very special context because architecture there is experienced together with landscape, contemporary art and public space. The works are not isolated objects; people walk between them, spend time around them and interact with them.

For us, it was particularly meaningful to bring a contemporary Kazakh interpretation of the yurt into this context. Corten Yurt: Anti Yurt became the first yurt from Kazakhstan ever realized for Archstoyanie. The project also became part of the permanent collection of Nikola-Lenivets and will become the 57th pavilion in the park’s collection.

The project started with a simple question: can a traditional yurt become contemporary without losing its identity?

Instead of reproducing the familiar image of a yurt, we decided to work through opposition. A traditional yurt is lightweight, mobile, demountable and primarily made of timber. It creates a protective enclosure between people and the outside environment.

Our Anti Yurt deliberately becomes its opposite. It is made of weathering steel, weighs around three tonnes, is permanent rather than mobile, and remains open to the sun, wind and rain.

The pavilion consists of 714 individual cubic elements arranged in 22 layers. As you move around it, the elements overlap differently and the silhouette constantly changes. There is no single fixed façade or one definitive image of the object.

My role was to lead the architectural development of the project, from the initial concept and geometry through design development, coordination with engineering and fabrication, and finally the construction process together with our team and partners.

Getting it built was also a challenge outside architecture itself. After winning the competition, we received around 20–30 refusals from potential sponsors before finding the right partners to make the project possible. That process taught me that a strong architectural idea still needs people who are willing to believe in it and help bring it into reality.

The festival attracted around 13,000 visitors in a single day, and what became especially meaningful to me was seeing people use the pavilion in completely unexpected ways. They came inside, stayed there, talked, sang, listened and returned later. Some people also came specifically to watch the construction process, which we never expected.

For me, being the first Kazakh yurt at Archstoyanie is not about reproducing a cultural symbol. It is about showing that cultural identity can evolve. A tradition does not necessarily have to remain visually unchanged to remain meaningful.

You mentioned that the project combines weathering steel and timber, and the program you attended at Yacademy focused precisely on designing with wood: how do you think the Wood Architecture course helped you in the development of the Kazakh yurt?

Although Corten Yurt ultimately became a steel project, my experience with wood strongly influenced the way I approached its construction.

After Yacademy, I explored the yurt through timber in ŞENBER Wooden Tent. That project made me think more deeply about modular systems, individual components, joints and assembly.

Corten Yurt became almost the opposite experiment.

At one stage, we actually considered building the project in timber as well. We thought it would simplify the realization and fit naturally into the context of the festival. But eventually we returned to the original idea of weathering steel.

That decision strengthened the concept.

The traditional yurt is light, while ours is heavy. Traditional yurts are mobile, while ours is permanent. They are made of timber, while ours is made of steel. They protect people from the environment, while ours is deliberately exposed to it.

That contrast eventually led us to the term Anti Yurt.

There was also an unexpected result. After construction, we discovered that the geometry and steel shell created a strong acoustic effect: sound reverberates inside the pavilion and produces a distinctive echo.

We had never designed that as part of the concept.

For me, this was another reminder of something I first became interested in through wood architecture: material is not simply something you apply to a concept. Material can change the concept itself.

It seems like you feel a special connection with wood as a construction material: can you expand a little about this? Where does this interest come from, and how did Yacademy support this fascination? 

What attracts me to wood is that it sits somewhere between architecture, engineering and craft.

It is a natural material, but it can also be engineered with great precision. You can design a system digitally and then reduce it to individual physical elements that have to be fabricated, transported and assembled.

I am particularly interested in this relationship between computation and physical making.

Wood was important for me because it made this relationship very tangible. It forced me to think about scale, joints, structure, tolerances and fabrication rather than only about the final image.

Yacademy helped me move from simply liking wood as a material to understanding why I was interested in it.

I also like the way wood changes with time. It does not try to hide its age. It records weather, use and contact. That quality interests me because I think good architecture should be able to age rather than constantly trying to look new.

Over time, this interest expanded beyond wood itself. Today I am interested in material behaviour, computational design, fabrication and sustainability as one connected system.

So even when I work with steel, as in Corten Yurt, I still approach the material as an active part of the architectural idea.

Let’s have a look at the future, then: what are the next steps you would like to take? Is there any other project in the works or goal you wish to achieve in the near future?

The next step for me is to go deeper into the relationship between architecture, computation, materials and fabrication.

In October 2026, I will start the ITECH program at the University of Stuttgart, where I hope to explore these questions in a more research-oriented environment and work with people from different disciplines.

At the same time, I want to continue developing COGARTS as a practice and, most importantly, continue building.

Corten Yurt changed my understanding of what it means for a project to be finished.

When the construction was completed, I actually felt almost nothing. I just sat inside the pavilion and looked around. That surprised me because I still remember my first architecture award: I was incredibly happy and wanted to immediately tell all my friends and colleagues.

This time there was no such excitement.

For a while, I was even worried that maybe, as projects become bigger, the emotions become smaller.

But a few days later I was interviewed about the project. I started telling the story from the beginning: the first idea, the competition, the refusals, the construction, the last welded connection, the people who came to see the pavilion and the unexpected acoustic effect.

While talking about it, I suddenly felt the emotion I had expected to feel when the construction ended.

That made me realize that the project had not actually finished when we completed the building.

Its concept continued to develop.

During construction, reality changed the project. After opening, visitors changed it again. And one evening, sitting around a fire, I was asked once more:

“What is the main idea?”

I had answered this question many times, but never felt completely satisfied with my own explanation.

That evening I finally said:

“Honestly, it is an Anti Yurt.”

A traditional yurt is light. This one is heavy.

It is made of timber. This one is made of steel.

It can be assembled and dismantled. This one stays.

It protects people from nature. This one exposes them to it.

And suddenly, the idea made sense — even to me.

That was probably the most important lesson of the project: sometimes the concept does not end when the architect stops drawing. It continues through construction, material, collaboration, occupation and conversation.

That is one of the things I want to explore in my future work.

I want to design, but I also want to build, test, research and see what happens when architecture enters the real world.

Looking back, I think the most valuable thing I took from Yacademy was not a particular technique or a specific construction detail. It was a different attitude toward architecture.

It made me more interested in what happens after the idea is drawn — how it is fabricated, how it changes, what it becomes when other people get involved, and what unexpected things can emerge once it leaves the screen.

Corten Yurt taught me the same lesson again, but in a completely different material and context.

Now I want to continue moving in that direction: from ideas to experiments, from experiments to construction, and from construction to new questions.