Where be these houses in tornado zone, almost no where, but they keep rebuilding their houses out of wood, didn't these people ever listen to the three little pigs?
Problem
A typical
house, made of
wood, can be destroyed by
tornado in a
total time of four seconds only. The
dismantling begins with the
spreading debris and
crushing the windows, followed by the
rushing air, entering through every opening of the house, blowing the roof of house. Then after the roof is gone, the walls
collapse. In the final second, all the things in the house, like
furniture, books, mementos, are blown away.
The speed of
destruction is so fast that it’s always difficult to design for the
engineers to build
tornado resistant buildings. The people from the areas of
Missouri and
Joplin, areas that are highly
affected by
tornadoes, are still looking for such a design of home which is good looking as well as resists the forces of
tornadoes. Tornado-proof building designs are available at markets, but they give a look of bunker in normal days, as a result, locals do not prefer them.
So the
designer have to keep the
resiliency to
livability ratio constant in designing the
tornado resistant
buildings just like they do in other disasters like
flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes.
“If you try to make a full
earthquake-proof building, you will be ended with a 2ft thick box type
structurewith just one opening to let you in,” according to famous
architect of
California, Michael Willis. “You can design a 100%
tornado-resistant structure, but it will not meet the requirements of the users.”
So the main objective to be kept in mind while
designing in
disasters affected areas is to keep the balance between safety and
serviceability.
Solution
So a competition was announced under the title of
“Designing Recovery” for three different kinds of
natural disasters, Hurricane, Tornado and
Super-storm, one for each. The most interesting was
tornado-resistant building, as it faced a complete different scenario in parts of the country where natural conditions are unfavorable in building
basements and
tornado cellars.
Details of Plan
Q4 Architects came with an idea of
creating some safe place inside the home changing the
trend of creating safe places under the home, just like a
building inside a building. This idea can be
implementedanywhere in
tornado affected area. Almost 600 sq.ft area made of high quality
concrete with
tornado doors and
hurricane shutters, a place enough to keep the family as well as there valuables safe in
tornadoes, covered with several rooms of
timber.
The plan given by the
Q4 Architect is shown in figure. In normal days, the family is able to use car porch (No. 7), airy
breezeway, light-filled great room (No. 5) and bedroom wing. Where as in case of tornado, the
residents can move to the core of the building, which also have
Murphy beds, bathroom, kitchen.
The main idea behind creating such plan was to keep the cost of house below 50,000
dollars. One may simply ask that why not to build the
entire house with the same
concrete material. The answer is that it will again give a look of
bunker and also
construction cost will be too high. And the main thing is that the
locals not want to live there, whereas with this idea, u can
wrapped as many rooms with
numerous styles as you want.
So this idea kept the
resiliency to
livability ratio constant in case of
tornado-proof just like we kept it constant in other
natural disasters proof buildings.
