Archetypes..

What exactly will I be proposing/designing/building at Woodfordia?
Thinking about the community that I'm proposing that is essentially an educational facility teaching all aspects of living sustainably in the new age of fossil fuel depletion, overcrowding and limited resources.
Woodfordia will need:

• Houses
• Learning Centres
• Festival structures - amphitheatres? temporary stalls? festival accommodation?
• Communal gathering areas - some sort of a community centre
• Administration buildings? At entrance to the site?

I sketched out positioning of buildings and how things might work together and when I looked at the map again I realised that accommodation would work as effectively on the south western terraces.

Storm Resistance of Architecture

Principles
This presentation at the ideas festival looked at how we can come back from various natural disasters and how they have destroyed homes and lives. Flood, fire and cyclone design.

Resilience to the fires and floods come through design elements like:

• Single skin rather than cavity skin
• The ability to clean debris away after the storm
• Envelope that is resistent
• Roofs without cavities
• Simplicity of the building envelope
• Elevated buildings to dissipate wind pressures
• Design that equalises wind pressures
• Sealed floors
• Flood compartments

Within the fires and the floods, the agriculture is in danger too.
Other than that the main problems were in the ages and positioning within flood plains.

Raised architecture
Stilted designs are a simple and effective method to mitigate the flood waters, and it provides space under the building to plant. It will allow more breezes and is already very vernacular to the sub-tropics.


Exemplar:
Disaster Proof architecture. 
 
This house off the coast of South Carolina uses most of these principles, it is off the grid, storm resisitant, bush fire resistant and has survied floods.
Made of recycled steel and SIP panels.
Under house space functions as a screened porch in fair weather.

 (Web Ecoist 2012)

Domed Architecture

Other methods for countering the high winds of storms are in domes. Geodesic domes are incredibly strong, and with a smooth exterior finish guide the winds around the structure.

Said to hold up very well with both wind and water the domed designs have survived many natural disasters.

The "New life family Church" in Mississippi had withstood many disasters, including Katrina.

"Monolithic domes are extremely cheap, easy to build, and energy efficient. They are also fire-resistant, mold-resistant and impervious to rot. They’ve become the building type of choice in disaster relief areas, as they can often be erected in a couple of weeks with minimal materials and resources. Building them basically just consists of pouring a concrete foundation, inflating a a heavy-duty, dome-shaped “balloon”, erecting steel rebar scaffolding around that, and then spraying Concrete (Shotcrete) over the outside." (Fehrenbacher 2005)

While I had begun to turn away from hempcrete, these could apparently be used very easily as structures and constructed quite quickly and i'm sure hempcrete could be used as a concrete substitute.

References:

Fehrenbacher, J. 2005. Hurricane Resistant Housing: Monolithic Domes. Accessed October 2, 2012.http://inhabitat.com/monolithic-domes.

 Web Ecoist. 2012. Disaster-Proof Architecture: 13 Super-Strong Structures. Accessed October 3, 2012. http://webecoist.momtastic.com/2011/04/22/disaster-proof-architecture-13-super-strong-structures/