Update 2: At The Registan, Joshua discusses the story as well and some readers reply.

Update: Check out the official development website, it has some flashy 3D-models and lists the exclusive pastimes that will be available in Astana from next year onwards.

neweurasia reported more than a year ago about Sir Norman Foster’s gig in Astana, where he designed the pyramid-shaped “Palace of Peace and Reconciliation”. Contrary to one of Foster’s other projects, the new Wembley Stadium in the UK, the palace has been finished in record time and already hosted the Second Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions.

Now, after so much religious solemnity, chief planner and architect of the new Kazakh capital, Nursultan Nazarbayev, thought that it’s time for some circus. The growing population locked in the middle of the inhospitable Steppe capital is plagued by low winter temperatures dipping below -20°C and generally nasty weather conditions. So, within the next twelve months, relief is being built in the form of a giant yurt.

The transparent tent will be 150 meters high, house an indoor city and will provide temperatures of +15°C even when it’s freezing outside. The BBC and The Times round up the yurt’s specifications:

• The tent is being made from special material that absorbs sunlight to create the effect of summer inside.
• Underneath, in an area larger than 10 football stadiums, will be a city with squares and cobbled streets, canals, shopping centres and golf courses.
• It will defy the bitter Kazakh winter with tropical gardens, beaches and a nine-hole golf course and, as the president declared last week, provide “everything that a man needs for his life”.
• It will also house 225 shops and a concert venue for 5,000.
• Terraced gardens will stretch the area of two football pitches, gondolas will ply an artificial river and artificial wave pools and beaches will replicate the nearest sea

Foster has said he enjoys aspects of working for an autocrat. In a recent essay he criticised British public inquiries as “bureaucratic charades”