Damage due to natural hazards has increased dramatically in recent years, incurring lossesof life and property around the world. Housing and light-frame construction often bears the brunt of thisdamage. This paper outlines a program of research that questions whether current housing and lowbuildings in Canada, and around the world, are optimal to resist wind and snow loads as well as moisturepenetration through intact and storm-damaged cladding systems. The ultimate goal is to applyrepresentative environmental loads to instrumented full-scale houses and low buildings to investigate theway these structures respond and ultimately fail. The main goals of the research are to minimize damageto housing due to extreme weather events and to evolve more economical house and low buildingstructures in Canada and around the world. Ancillary projects, such as the effects of moisture on thebuilding envelope, and rain damage through breaches caused by wind-borne debris, will also besupported by the full-scale test facility. As a prerequisite to designing a full-scale test facility, wind tunneltests are being conducted to determine the wind loads on a typical new house configuration underdifferent exposure conditions. Preliminary results from these tests are presented in this paper, along witha more detailed description of the future full-scale test facility.
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