Home design that can stand up to a tornado
Posted by Josh Taylor / October 3, 2013 safe spacetornado alleytornado precautionstornado shelter
The problem with a tornado shelter is simple: you can’t live in it when a tornado destroys your home. That’s what makes this home design so unique:
Q4 Architects created a safe space within a home instead of a shelter underneath it, a kind of house inside of a house. The result is an idea that could be replicated anywhere in tornado alley: A highly indestructible 600 square-foot core of concrete masonry, hurricane shutters and tornado doors where a family could survive a tornado and live beyond it, with several more flexible (and affordable) rooms wrapped around it.
You can see the space in the floor plan above––it’s the bolded part.
The genius of this idea is that it would be significantly more expensive to build out the same tornado precautions for the entire home (the CORE house, as with each of these projects, is meant to be constructed for under $50,000). And, chances are, you wouldn’t want to live there. Instead, houses of numerous styles could be wrapped around such a safe space.
Full story at The Atlantic.
Image credit: Q4 Architects
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