Networking Core Centers Project: Training Workshop in Mongolia’s Amarbayasgalant Monastery for Building Restoration
We dispatched four experts from Japan from August 18 to 29 as part of the Networking Core Centers Project in Mongolia and held a training workshop on the conservation and restoration of wooden buildings at the Amarbayasgalant Monastery in northern Selenge Province. This was the second workshop in 2009 jointly planned by the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of Mongolia. The purpose was to contribute in capacity building for the conservation and repair techniques of wooden buildings in Mongolia.
The workshop allowed students of the Architecture Department of the Mongolian State University of Scientific Technology to learn about the preliminary surveys needed for conservation/repair and design, and basic methods of drawing a plan as based on site survey. In classroom lectures the students learned the methods of repairing and surveying the buildings of cultural heritage in Mongolia and Japan, and in field practice they measured the buildings of Amarbayasgalant Monastery.
Japanese temple/shrine master carpenter who had been dispatched by UNESCO as instructor during the repairs of the Monastery in the 1980s also participated to this training, so that the students could receive practical training on concrete methods of survey, drawing, and planning.
Although it was the first time for the students to survey a historic wooden building by actually touching it, the lecturers could see that through the training process their view about buildings was being formed by on-site experience.
In Mongolia, where there are few experts majoring in the conservation of cultural heritage buildings, we believe that the students have demonstrated the potential capacity of the future of the conservation of wooden buildings.