The UFO house has a message to tell us all!

Seen on a Florida highway...

Amazing!

On the highway side, the current owners have placed two "aliens" in one of the windows!

On the other end of the barrier island I saw this!  So maybe the ideas IS catching on!

This roadside oddity at first glance falls into the "how strange is this..." category.  But wait just one minute!

Built in 1966 and designed by Matti Suuronen, this structure has survived 41 hurricane seasons!  Yeah it looks a lot like the Jupiter II, but there's something more.

I have always wondered if this structure was studied by the IBHS...  It seems like it is a great structure for coastal locations that get the occasional hurricane...

From our friends at NOAA, these are all the Hurricanes (tracks) that have hit the area since the UFO house aka the Futuro was built!

The coefficient of drag, Cd, has got to be really favorable in this type of building.



Where variables are described here:

Now then, the Cd of a flat surface is 1.28... a large multiplier (think of it as 128%), while the Cd of a sphere is as low as 0.07.  Shazaaam!  As Pfc Pyle would say.  So if your beach home has a SHAPE that allows the wind to slide around it in a favorable way, that crazy fast wind just doesn't create as large a force as if the structure is a box on poles... Even rounding the corners... like a bolt - on ground effects kit that round corners and transition roof eaves, would help a ton! A great project for some architect grad students...  maybe even funded by IBHS... 

Now that doesn't address flying debris, so this isn't as good a solution for inland dwellings, but for a coastal structure up on pilings... seems like a great idea to me.

Sort of reminds me of this visionary idea that came along 20 something years before...

The odd thing to me is, neither introduction of this architecture , both the 1940's nor the 1960's sought to study or demonstrate survivability in coastal weather.  I think they would do great as a beach house, and I think insurance companies would love them too!  The Buckminster Fuller Dymaxion was an idea to provide cheap modular housing in a post war era, the Futuro an edgy modern slick efficient design.  Both missed what could be the disruptive appeal to this design!

I think a ground effects kit for a box type home would be awesome! 


That's all for now!

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