All this hurricane action has really had me thinking over the weekend, especially last night as I saw the typical videos of wood siding and aluminum roofing flying through the air, and water rising above doorjams and such.
So...what ideas do some of you have for better homes and buildings able to withstand high winds and flooding? Certainly there has to be a variety of new ways, possibly even involving pre-fab housing, to combat hurricane destruction and speed up the rebuilding time for affected cities.
I could see this being an interesting contest to see who can come up with the most effective method of designing a hurricane proof home that would be situated on a beachfront. It would be especially awesome if the house was built well enough that the residents would not have to evacuate and could sit there and ride the thing out, kicked back on the couch watching Goonies.
I'll be watching this thread with interest. Though the topic is very important, I don't expect it to resonate well with most Archinect-ers since it doesn't involve style, blobs, or the "usual suspects" (Koolhaas/ Libeskind/ Gehry/ Mayne/ et al). I hope to be wrong here, and that a flood (so to speak) of great ideas appears.
the islands in the carribean withstand storm after storm, without evacuation. they are so frequently hit by storms that the vernacular consists mostly of some form of masonry, and an easily repairable roof system.
Interesting about the Carribean. I hope some interesting ideas get posted here. I'm not an architect, but love anything to do with architecture and new ways of building things.
toshiko mori designed a beach house in florida that deals w/ some of these issues in interesting ways. can't remember the specifics off the top of my head, but i think she had to do some work to convince the building code people down in florida that some of the windows and other things could effectively survive a hurricane.
One of the things I was thinking of for windows would involve a built in, roll down aluminum (or some type of heavy duty metal or material, kevlar perhaps?) screen that would be on the outside of the window. Roll down, lock into place. Watertight.
I guess there are two ways to take this: creating a home you could ride out a bad hurrican in, or a place you would leave but that would be in perfect shape when you return.
Typically building components concrete masonry walls, reinforced timbers structured roofs. Everything that needs to flex can, everything that needs to be rigid is.
I would imagine that a lot of the issues with hurricane protection for buildings would be very similar to the issues of tornado protection. I'd be willing to bet some arch schools in tornado alley have done research on resistance to heavy winds.
the firm i work for is doing schematic design now for an airport in the caribbean and since the airport would be so vital to recovery ops for the area it needs to be up and running inside of a day or two from the hit. I think that they are going to buy extra mechanical/electrical equipment and store them so that if the units on the roof get demolished they get the others in place without shipping em in.
i wonder how green roofs hold up to a tropical storm....
the danger with having a hermetic seal around all openings in the house has to do with presssure. basic bernoulli. the wind (cat. 5 is 156+ mph) moving decreases pressure on the exterior. eventually the pressure differential is enough to literally explode the house.
you'd want concrete structure with strong venestration and some ventilation for pressure. that'll hold the house in place. (wind, check) have the finished floor at maybe +5', +7' for storm surge if it's close to water. (water, check). then maybe have some kind of protective shield for glassy areas to protect from debris and make sure the doors are solid enough. (debris damage, check).
hunker down with your emergency supplies and a deck of cards and you're set.
I'm from the outer banks area of NC and a +5' +7' storm surge clearance is laughable - check out the building code requirements for any coastal region in "hurrican alley" and you'll find more like 14' clearance. You don't want any heated square footage on the ground. All walls should be wash-out walls below this 14' margin. Large spans of glass should be protected with roll down shutters. A grass roof? You've got to be kidding.
The insurance industry pulls a lot of weight in producing coastal building codes. Concrete is good, but it's hard to find concrete contractors in many coastal areas who are comfortable with that kind of construction. You usually end up with p.t. 10x10's and a 4" slab on the ground with plenty of rebar and every other bay is x-braced. Flat roofs are nice, but can be a leaking hazard.
My thesis was on a new form of beach vernacular housing that would be implimented as initial disaster relief housing and then it would be upgraded, adapted and retrofitted to become a shifting house [something that would move with the shifting sands of the beach - set on post-hurricane Isabel Hatterras, NC]. The wind load calculations and structural sizing that resulted from these calculations were pretty intense.
Steel is good, but you have to treat it. Any composite material will more than likely be damaged by wind debris. Materials should be sustainable [so when a panel rips off, i can be recycled or even biodegradable] - ect ect
sorry for the scatterbrained response, busy day at work!
i wasnt talking about survival of the grass but of whether the soil/seperation layer let water through fast enough to not overload the roof.... or whether the wind would rip the components from the roof down to the structure.
Typically with Roofing in a Hurricane zone, you have to use a heavy duty hurrican clip and tego nails.
In a coastal region it's hard for grass to survive - there isnt a whole lot of water and the sun scorces anything green. We managed to plant a sea oat roof once tho'.
What would be the benefit of having a sod roof anyway on a "hurricane proof house"?
center for ants is right. The biggest damage caused by hurricanes is not direct wind - unless you count what it does to loose debris - trees, animals, etc. The biggest threat is the suction (see eddy effect) that flies over the houses - particularly the roofs at excess of 100 mph and causing a return effect that is similar to can being peeled back.
Tornadoes are different - very different, you want weighted structures. Things that will hold down from the winds which have cyclonic tendencies. Swirling winds that do cause suction well but not at the expotential e3/4x of hurricanes.
There's quite alot of research on it. Mostly done by PAHO/WHO
if you guys are interested in this you should do some reasearch. a note of history, when hurican andrew hit florida the building built to take a cat 5 storm which is the huricaine center, didnt make it out unscathed.
you would think they would have a good idea what kind of forces a huricane can give.
In the caribean, people live in 3rd world conditions...their houses get wrecked and they rebuild them with more crappy construction...people die...
the houses that are getting wrecked in fla are old construction, new construction standards are pretty good. But lets face it, the news doesnt show the thousands of houses that make it just fine, the seem to find some trailer park all blown up....
i am sure it would finally make sense to change from the often cheap and fast wood construction to concrete buildings, that would change everything... would need a huge change of mentality and tradition tough, but I think it's kind of stupid to regularly rebuild your house as the same wood crap instead of starting of with something durable...
Ok - It is on stilts, that is the initial relief module [to replace a FEMA trailor] and it's not made of containers [does everything modular have to called a "container"?] - it's not meant to withstand hurricanes either, it can be moved away from the trouble zone. It's a new[er] way to inhabit islands. Not permenant, not static. But take whatever stigmas you want and dwell on those.
This is was to code in every way - dont try to call me out. Again, read and look.
You guys must have ADD - or you dont pay attention to detail, one of the two - either way, that can be bad for your future profession. Clowns.
The problem is that most coastal zones are too delicate to be inhabited in a permenant way. Erosion is a natural process and permenant houses do nothing by hinder this process. Hurricanes are a natural phenomenum and it's foolish to think that any building should or will withstand them. Buildings are not meant to be on the beach - unless the only footprint they leave is an impermenant one.
If you want a freakin concrete bunker, dont worry, the erosion will wash it away and besides a nice concrete trench would kick up some nice Aframes. I'd split that mountain with my composite surfboard.
caffienejunkie - careful there are over 1,000 islands in the Caribbean each with different standards for safeguarding against hurricanes. But here's reality when Andrew left the Caribbean it was still a cat.5 and it hit directly through Trinidad (one of the more rural areas in Cuba) and caused less deaths than in Florida.
JohnProlly - sorry you describe before posting images. And like you thought we did opened your mouth without thinking - it must be contagious. 15 years + experience in areas prone to natural disaster, and a post-graduate certificate in disaster mitigation <- this is what I do. Anyhow its still nice work - container=modular=light enough to ship=light enough to fly away in the storm
manteno - i was thinking something similar, except I wasn't coming from a blob-style architecture way of thinking...
I was thinking that, because lift is one of the problems roofs face in a storm, wouldn't we learn something from F1 style technology where form creates the opposite of lift. Would, what the racecar guys term, 'downforce' be something worth thinking about when trying to fix a house to the ground in a storm?
I realise that cost of materials and the available technolgy between your average house and Schumacher's Ferrari are worlds apart but maybe that would be a route I would like to explore.
I don't know too much about storms, I imagine the main problem is that the wind comes from all directions and not only from the front, passing smoothly to the back, as is the case in car racing. What do you guys think?
Interesting responses, but let's look at the problem. Why is it even a good thing to build in potential hurricane zones? Why not just build somewhere else?
Good question! But as long as the beach and an undistorted view of the ocean exists, people will want to live at the very edge of it, hurricanes or not.
what about tornado alley? or california with its earthquakes? not a whole lot of places in the us or the world that dont have some sort of natural phenomena that could make it difficult to build/design at that locale.
Nicoli, tornados and earthquakes seem to occur with far less frequency than hurricanes. Hurricanes hit the same areas again, and again and again. I think we need to build in these areas, but people continuing to build and rebuild cheap, shitty houses is just a complete failure on so many levels. This thread is good because hopefully it will help people begin to deal, but the far easier, cheaper solution for people who lose their homes multiple times is to move away, isn't it?
Earthquakes are a lot more frequent that you would think. There are earthquaes daily in Japan (possibly california too but I don't know), not that you hear about all of them of course, they are not all visably destructive. They are, however, always considered though when building. The way the Japanese build even the most standard of houses has been designed with these earthquakes in mind. The techniques used for construction have developed as knowledge of eartquakes grows.
The same has to be true of hurricanes and other destructive storms although, like earthquake protection, the building methods may, more likely, slowly chance as experience increases; evoloution not revolution (sorry for the catchphrase!).
Would the lego-method be ok? Let it fall down into safe and reusable sized parts. Simply reattach the bits after a storm? Clearly there would have to be some kind of solid base to build onto.
Here's a general thought: Quit messin' w/ all of the sand dunes & barrier islands.
Make them bldgs for the New Jersey Bermuda shorts (& black socks) crowd set back far enough to control erosion & not faak up a nice natural gift called "the beach." Let the Redneck Riviera fall into the sea the next hurricane. Appraoach coastal design & construction with the novel ideas of incorporating context & deliberation into what we build. Basically, build to respect Mamma Nature & she won't spank us as badly. Oh yeah, make coastal residents pay for their own damage & quit bailing them out (up to 18 times, per FEMA backed insurance) every time there's one of those 'unexpected' hurricanes.
Hey 3ifs,
Maybe they don't evacuate in the Carribean because they kinda get killed during hurricanes. Aren't we forgetting an example like Haiti just last year. I believe that death toll was pretty catastrophic.
I spoke to a coworker who's brother lives in Alabama and is a card-carrying, certified Redneck. He wanted me to pass this message along to you:
"Don't yo' dast be tellyng me thet ah cain't live on th' betch. Yer so called "Redneck Rivahia" is mine t'live on an' fish on an' six pack on an' raise hell on, as enny fool kin plainly see. A man needs t'see th' ocean an' knows it's whar he hangs his hat. An' how dast yo' call us rednecks! We live side by side wif th' rich folk, we jest use tires fo' lan'scapin' an' drive old Fo'd trucks coated in rest an' puke. So come on down hyar an' stay th' weekend, an' we will show yo' how easy it is t'rebuild a home thet only cost $10,000 in th' fust place!"
Hurricane Proof Architecture
All this hurricane action has really had me thinking over the weekend, especially last night as I saw the typical videos of wood siding and aluminum roofing flying through the air, and water rising above doorjams and such.
So...what ideas do some of you have for better homes and buildings able to withstand high winds and flooding? Certainly there has to be a variety of new ways, possibly even involving pre-fab housing, to combat hurricane destruction and speed up the rebuilding time for affected cities.
I could see this being an interesting contest to see who can come up with the most effective method of designing a hurricane proof home that would be situated on a beachfront. It would be especially awesome if the house was built well enough that the residents would not have to evacuate and could sit there and ride the thing out, kicked back on the couch watching Goonies.
Manteno,
I'll be watching this thread with interest. Though the topic is very important, I don't expect it to resonate well with most Archinect-ers since it doesn't involve style, blobs, or the "usual suspects" (Koolhaas/ Libeskind/ Gehry/ Mayne/ et al). I hope to be wrong here, and that a flood (so to speak) of great ideas appears.
look to the carribean manteno.
the islands in the carribean withstand storm after storm, without evacuation. they are so frequently hit by storms that the vernacular consists mostly of some form of masonry, and an easily repairable roof system.
what's the budget please?
Interesting about the Carribean. I hope some interesting ideas get posted here. I'm not an architect, but love anything to do with architecture and new ways of building things.
If there had to be a budget...I would figure it would be comparable to the average types of homes that get battered to bits along a beachfront.
http://www.pensacolainformation.com/waterfrontmls.htm
toshiko mori designed a beach house in florida that deals w/ some of these issues in interesting ways. can't remember the specifics off the top of my head, but i think she had to do some work to convince the building code people down in florida that some of the windows and other things could effectively survive a hurricane.
One of the things I was thinking of for windows would involve a built in, roll down aluminum (or some type of heavy duty metal or material, kevlar perhaps?) screen that would be on the outside of the window. Roll down, lock into place. Watertight.
I guess there are two ways to take this: creating a home you could ride out a bad hurrican in, or a place you would leave but that would be in perfect shape when you return.
3ifs is right look down at us.
Typically building components concrete masonry walls, reinforced timbers structured roofs. Everything that needs to flex can, everything that needs to be rigid is.
I would imagine that a lot of the issues with hurricane protection for buildings would be very similar to the issues of tornado protection. I'd be willing to bet some arch schools in tornado alley have done research on resistance to heavy winds.
the firm i work for is doing schematic design now for an airport in the caribbean and since the airport would be so vital to recovery ops for the area it needs to be up and running inside of a day or two from the hit. I think that they are going to buy extra mechanical/electrical equipment and store them so that if the units on the roof get demolished they get the others in place without shipping em in.
i wonder how green roofs hold up to a tropical storm....
manteno-
the danger with having a hermetic seal around all openings in the house has to do with presssure. basic bernoulli. the wind (cat. 5 is 156+ mph) moving decreases pressure on the exterior. eventually the pressure differential is enough to literally explode the house.
you'd want concrete structure with strong venestration and some ventilation for pressure. that'll hold the house in place. (wind, check) have the finished floor at maybe +5', +7' for storm surge if it's close to water. (water, check). then maybe have some kind of protective shield for glassy areas to protect from debris and make sure the doors are solid enough. (debris damage, check).
hunker down with your emergency supplies and a deck of cards and you're set.
deck of cards????
More like a bottle of Jack Daniels and Twister!
I'm from the outer banks area of NC and a +5' +7' storm surge clearance is laughable - check out the building code requirements for any coastal region in "hurrican alley" and you'll find more like 14' clearance. You don't want any heated square footage on the ground. All walls should be wash-out walls below this 14' margin. Large spans of glass should be protected with roll down shutters. A grass roof? You've got to be kidding.
The insurance industry pulls a lot of weight in producing coastal building codes. Concrete is good, but it's hard to find concrete contractors in many coastal areas who are comfortable with that kind of construction. You usually end up with p.t. 10x10's and a 4" slab on the ground with plenty of rebar and every other bay is x-braced. Flat roofs are nice, but can be a leaking hazard.
My thesis was on a new form of beach vernacular housing that would be implimented as initial disaster relief housing and then it would be upgraded, adapted and retrofitted to become a shifting house [something that would move with the shifting sands of the beach - set on post-hurricane Isabel Hatterras, NC]. The wind load calculations and structural sizing that resulted from these calculations were pretty intense.
Steel is good, but you have to treat it. Any composite material will more than likely be damaged by wind debris. Materials should be sustainable [so when a panel rips off, i can be recycled or even biodegradable] - ect ect
sorry for the scatterbrained response, busy day at work!
john-
have any pics of the thesis? i'd be interested in looking at it.
i wasnt talking about survival of the grass but of whether the soil/seperation layer let water through fast enough to not overload the roof.... or whether the wind would rip the components from the roof down to the structure.
http://www.archinect.com/forum/threads.php?id=P7523_0_42_0_C
Typically with Roofing in a Hurricane zone, you have to use a heavy duty hurrican clip and tego nails.
In a coastal region it's hard for grass to survive - there isnt a whole lot of water and the sun scorces anything green. We managed to plant a sea oat roof once tho'.
What would be the benefit of having a sod roof anyway on a "hurricane proof house"?
ACFA - I'll post some images soon.
Ok so here's a few images - Not the best and not the final ones I used in my document and presentation, but all I had here at work.
And I'm sure this means it is open to critique now.
Explanation can / will follow is needed.
Context
Shift_house
Hmm so I guess there is a res limit? ha. well there's half the imagery.
center for ants is right. The biggest damage caused by hurricanes is not direct wind - unless you count what it does to loose debris - trees, animals, etc. The biggest threat is the suction (see eddy effect) that flies over the houses - particularly the roofs at excess of 100 mph and causing a return effect that is similar to can being peeled back.
Tornadoes are different - very different, you want weighted structures. Things that will hold down from the winds which have cyclonic tendencies. Swirling winds that do cause suction well but not at the expotential e3/4x of hurricanes.
There's quite alot of research on it. Mostly done by PAHO/WHO
hmm that building would fly away btw
containers usually are the worse form of missiles in hurricanes
if you guys are interested in this you should do some reasearch. a note of history, when hurican andrew hit florida the building built to take a cat 5 storm which is the huricaine center, didnt make it out unscathed.
you would think they would have a good idea what kind of forces a huricane can give.
In the caribean, people live in 3rd world conditions...their houses get wrecked and they rebuild them with more crappy construction...people die...
the houses that are getting wrecked in fla are old construction, new construction standards are pretty good. But lets face it, the news doesnt show the thousands of houses that make it just fine, the seem to find some trailer park all blown up....
oh yeah and JohnProlly, sorry but the building code wont let you build your house...
It needs to be above the storm surge...that means stilts
i am sure it would finally make sense to change from the often cheap and fast wood construction to concrete buildings, that would change everything... would need a huge change of mentality and tradition tough, but I think it's kind of stupid to regularly rebuild your house as the same wood crap instead of starting of with something durable...
Caffeinejunie and Architechnophilia:
Read, then open your mouth.
Ok - It is on stilts, that is the initial relief module [to replace a FEMA trailor] and it's not made of containers [does everything modular have to called a "container"?] - it's not meant to withstand hurricanes either, it can be moved away from the trouble zone. It's a new[er] way to inhabit islands. Not permenant, not static. But take whatever stigmas you want and dwell on those.
This is was to code in every way - dont try to call me out. Again, read and look.
You guys must have ADD - or you dont pay attention to detail, one of the two - either way, that can be bad for your future profession. Clowns.
The problem is that most coastal zones are too delicate to be inhabited in a permenant way. Erosion is a natural process and permenant houses do nothing by hinder this process. Hurricanes are a natural phenomenum and it's foolish to think that any building should or will withstand them. Buildings are not meant to be on the beach - unless the only footprint they leave is an impermenant one.
If you want a freakin concrete bunker, dont worry, the erosion will wash it away and besides a nice concrete trench would kick up some nice Aframes. I'd split that mountain with my composite surfboard.
Architecture should influence policy.
Interesting stuff from all of you. It makes me wonder, is blob style architecture perhaps a fitting way of combating direct wind.
If your wall that is facing the sea, and direct wind is curved and a bit aerodynamic, wouldn't direct force be reduced tremendously?
I'm sure it would - But if it could harvest the wind and turn it into energy, that would be a better resolution.
caffienejunkie - careful there are over 1,000 islands in the Caribbean each with different standards for safeguarding against hurricanes. But here's reality when Andrew left the Caribbean it was still a cat.5 and it hit directly through Trinidad (one of the more rural areas in Cuba) and caused less deaths than in Florida.
JohnProlly - sorry you describe before posting images. And like you thought we did opened your mouth without thinking - it must be contagious. 15 years + experience in areas prone to natural disaster, and a post-graduate certificate in disaster mitigation <- this is what I do. Anyhow its still nice work - container=modular=light enough to ship=light enough to fly away in the storm
concrete house
manteno - i was thinking something similar, except I wasn't coming from a blob-style architecture way of thinking...
I was thinking that, because lift is one of the problems roofs face in a storm, wouldn't we learn something from F1 style technology where form creates the opposite of lift. Would, what the racecar guys term, 'downforce' be something worth thinking about when trying to fix a house to the ground in a storm?
I realise that cost of materials and the available technolgy between your average house and Schumacher's Ferrari are worlds apart but maybe that would be a route I would like to explore.
I don't know too much about storms, I imagine the main problem is that the wind comes from all directions and not only from the front, passing smoothly to the back, as is the case in car racing. What do you guys think?
Interesting responses, but let's look at the problem. Why is it even a good thing to build in potential hurricane zones? Why not just build somewhere else?
PeteyPablo,
Good question! But as long as the beach and an undistorted view of the ocean exists, people will want to live at the very edge of it, hurricanes or not.
what about tornado alley? or california with its earthquakes? not a whole lot of places in the us or the world that dont have some sort of natural phenomena that could make it difficult to build/design at that locale.
Nicoli, tornados and earthquakes seem to occur with far less frequency than hurricanes. Hurricanes hit the same areas again, and again and again. I think we need to build in these areas, but people continuing to build and rebuild cheap, shitty houses is just a complete failure on so many levels. This thread is good because hopefully it will help people begin to deal, but the far easier, cheaper solution for people who lose their homes multiple times is to move away, isn't it?
Earthquakes are a lot more frequent that you would think. There are earthquaes daily in Japan (possibly california too but I don't know), not that you hear about all of them of course, they are not all visably destructive. They are, however, always considered though when building. The way the Japanese build even the most standard of houses has been designed with these earthquakes in mind. The techniques used for construction have developed as knowledge of eartquakes grows.
The same has to be true of hurricanes and other destructive storms although, like earthquake protection, the building methods may, more likely, slowly chance as experience increases; evoloution not revolution (sorry for the catchphrase!).
Would the lego-method be ok? Let it fall down into safe and reusable sized parts. Simply reattach the bits after a storm? Clearly there would have to be some kind of solid base to build onto.
Here's a general thought: Quit messin' w/ all of the sand dunes & barrier islands.
Make them bldgs for the New Jersey Bermuda shorts (& black socks) crowd set back far enough to control erosion & not faak up a nice natural gift called "the beach." Let the Redneck Riviera fall into the sea the next hurricane. Appraoach coastal design & construction with the novel ideas of incorporating context & deliberation into what we build. Basically, build to respect Mamma Nature & she won't spank us as badly. Oh yeah, make coastal residents pay for their own damage & quit bailing them out (up to 18 times, per FEMA backed insurance) every time there's one of those 'unexpected' hurricanes.
Hey 3ifs,
Maybe they don't evacuate in the Carribean because they kinda get killed during hurricanes. Aren't we forgetting an example like Haiti just last year. I believe that death toll was pretty catastrophic.
MysteryMan,
I spoke to a coworker who's brother lives in Alabama and is a card-carrying, certified Redneck. He wanted me to pass this message along to you:
"Don't yo' dast be tellyng me thet ah cain't live on th' betch. Yer so called "Redneck Rivahia" is mine t'live on an' fish on an' six pack on an' raise hell on, as enny fool kin plainly see. A man needs t'see th' ocean an' knows it's whar he hangs his hat. An' how dast yo' call us rednecks! We live side by side wif th' rich folk, we jest use tires fo' lan'scapin' an' drive old Fo'd trucks coated in rest an' puke. So come on down hyar an' stay th' weekend, an' we will show yo' how easy it is t'rebuild a home thet only cost $10,000 in th' fust place!"
HEYLL, Ah kin beeeld that fer $5000.
Anyway, I can't wait to hear from your relatives from Jersey!
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