2015 Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize: Queensland University of Technology

Project statement

Oklahoma State is in the heart of North America’s Tornado Alley. Each year, on average, more than 1,200 tornadoes strike in the US, with severe tornadoes killing and injuring many people and costing billions of dollars in damages. Tornado Alley’s low-income communities are stuck in a chronic cycle of substandard rebuilding, often leaving them even more vulnerable to the next tornado. This design proposal takes a critical approach to the problem and presents an alternative treatment of the built environment, the landscape structure and community disturbance responses.

A key innovation is the manipulation of large-scale landscape texture and surface roughness (for example, irrigated agriculture and forestry) as a means to decrease vulnerability to wind disturbances. This would also create new economic drivers for improved economic resilience. Another important component is the creation of commuter refuges, which would be strategically located at the most vulnerable points along the Oklahoma City tourist drive, a primary transport corridor.

In this project, not only is the likelihood of severe tornadoes reduced through the strategic (re)texturing of the landscape at the regional scale, but also in the event of such extreme wind disturbances, the most vulnerable would be protected at the community scale, within a hierarchical resilience strategy.