Future Homes, A home that can withstand a tornado..

Check these homes on Forbes. Some of them look really cool, and some look kind of dumb. I like the tornado home, Sea hotel and the moon Home. I also like the home in the Blimp. Looks really cool. The robot home, I wish they had inside pictures because I don't know what to make of that one.

Tornado-Proof Home

Ted Givens, an architect with Hong Kong's 10Design created this prototype for a tornado-safe home. Hydraulic levers pull the Kevlar-coated house into the ground when high-velocity winds pass by. The high-tech structure's roof then locks so water and wind can't enter. Once the weather clears, the house unfolds and residents resume normal life.

www.forbes.com... content

It's actually pretty simple, if people could get away from their brainwashed need for right angles. A round house is FAR more tornado resistant than a square or rectangle. Prestressed concrete is durable, fairly inexpensive, and fireproof and formed into a dome shape, very tornado resistant. And of course more exotic designs are fun if not cheap. People live in boxes and can't think outside of one.

Some do indeed look silly. I mean, I see blimps for homes, screwy looking shapes for homes, and then...

Oh look! The Jetsons!

reply to post by AdamsMurmur


Yeah, I like that one.

Don't pyramids already accomplish this?

For my money I still think the earth bag homes are the best. In fact working on getting some land and doing one myself.

We humans are so arrogant over our technology, and so stupidly proud of it that we are ruining the planet. You would think that even if we are thick as a brick as Jethro Tull said, eventually we would get the idea that whenever we think we have it all figured out, we don't. On top of that even though we continually get it wrong and things keep getting worse precisely because we are so arrogant, we cling to this stupid arrogance as though it will suddenly cure things for us. It hasn't and it won't.

These buildings look really high tech, but I am from tornado alley and I guarantee, a tornado lands on this thing the folks inside will not be smiling out their windows. They might fly out their windows, but at the very least they will be guilty of underestimating the forces we love to look down our noses at.

I keep thinking about the tornado exhibit in the old Illinois State Museum which included a splinter of wood driven by a tornado into an oak tree. An oak tree! Mother Nature is even hard on her own.

Now this Jetson like home might be made of titanium, in which case it is subject to vaporization should there be a kerosene fire. (see 911/Pentagon crash) But whatever it is made of this home will be exorbitantly expensive. Compare this abstract cost to the cost of my previously mentioned favorite type of home which usually runs a few thousand to construct. I think we have done dumb, and we are fully prepared to continue on this path and do dumb again and again.

The PDF I have on these types of homes shows a picture of a early 70's Cutlass Supreme that had hit a noise abatement wall made of earth bags - you know the wall between the freeway and the subdivision. The earth bag wall? Some of the plaster was knocked off, but none of the earth bags were disturbed in the slightest. The Cutlass Supreme? Totaled! Undrivable! Now it is true that a 71 Cutlass Supreme is no tornado, but couple this durability with the unique thermal qualities of the earth bag home and you can chose yourself between something that will do nothing but save you money from the day you begin to the day you die, and another toy to massage your ego and vanity and impress your friends. Given a choice in a tornado, I will be in my hobbit hole.

As far as that goes, if my friends are this easily and shallowly impressed, then it is time to work on a new friends list.

Sorry OP had to give up on glittering objects on the next hill long ago. I learned that they usually turn out to be a zip tab from a beer can or that little strip of tinfoil off of a cigarette pack when you finally get there. Happiness comes from inside and much of the rest of the world is patently waiting for the west to catch up, and grow up.

Itta