Dive Brief:
- Q4 Architects, based in Toronto and working in Canada and several U.S. states, design a house that has a concrete, tornado-proof core for the essential parts of living.
- The home would lose conventionally built parts, but residents could shelter in the 600-square-foot core of concrete with heavy-duty doors and the house's bathroom and kitchen and fold-down beds.
- The home was Q4's entry in the "Designing Recovery" contest and was aimed at areas where the geology makes it difficult or impossible to built tornado shelters underground.
Dive Insight:
It takes a tornado about four seconds to knock out windows, lift the roof as air rushes in and collapse the walls after the roof is gone, but Q4's home is designed to keep the tornado out of the core and give people a shelter from which to emerge and begin to recover. The architectural challenge was to combine durability with a home in which people will want to live in all the time when nature does not threaten destruction in New Orleans, New York or Joplin, Mo.