CountryPlans.com Country planning and cottage association.
Title
Cottage, cabin & small country home plans
Description
n the dry mountains of Northwestern Iran is the province of Kurdistan.The Kurds are a proud tribal people who's homeland has been carved up between Iran, Turkey and Iraq. I was there as a Peace Corps architect working with village elders and local government officials. We built schools, bath houses and public water systems for the local villages. If the village could supply the labor for a project, then the Iranian government would buy the materials and our office would design and supervise the construction. Some interesting projects were built using the simplest of materials.
I was there for the better part of two years. This was before the Islamic revolution and I often wonder if old Iranian friends and co-workers made it through.
Progress there was very slow. I spent 6 months working on a beautiful set of plans (in arabic script!) for a new earthquake-proof school. The only thing that was non-standard from normal village construction (mud walls, 12" thick flat mud and brick roof) was a steep lightweight metal roof with clearstory windows at the peak (for ventilation and to get light to the center desks — village schools have no electricity). This roof had the advantage of being a lightweight and stable triangular truss that could ride out an earthquake. It was never built because it didn't have the traditional heavy flat mud roof (the ones that come down on your head when the beams slide off the shaking walls). The major problem seemed to be, "what will the fellow who sweeps the snow off the roof do if we build this?" Mentioning that the snow would slide off did not appear to be the right answer. I think about that unbuilt school every time I hear about thousands of people dying in an Iranian earthquake.
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