ICLR WindEEE & 25th Anniversary

In November 2022 ICLR held its twenty-fifth anniversary conference at Western University, and for a research institute that is a room full of people who mostly spend their time on models and data, it was a big event. Delegates came in from across the province and from further out. It was the kind of day where the science and the money are finally in the same room.

I was hired to do four things: collect footage of ICLR in action, get shots of the wind tunnel, film some short interviews, and cover Paul Kovacs giving his speech. That is a small brief on paper and a full day in practice, because everything worth filming is on the move at once.

The wind tunnel is the part that stays with you. Inside the WindEEE Dome there is machinery that makes a tornado in the room — a real one, spinning up on demand, around a model of a building. You watch the vortex form, and then you watch what it does to the structure: how the air goes over the roof, how it wraps the walls, where the pressure actually lands. It is one thing to read that a roof shape changes the load a house takes. It is another to see it happen in front of you in London, Ontario.

That facility is not new to the idea. The older of the two labs on campus has been testing buildings since the mid-1960s, when structural engineers planning what became the World Trade Center towers needed somewhere to put a model in moving air and there was nothing that could do it. They built the tool. It is still there.

The reason I keep working with ICLR is simple. They are in one of the rare industries where the wins line up. Insurers put money into the research and get fewer claims and more predictable risk, which is what lets them price better. Government pays in one direction and saves in the other, because a property that survives a storm does not need compensating or rebuilding. Builders get something they can sell — a home that stands up to weather is a reason to charge a premium, and a real one. And the people who live in the house keep their house. No claim, no displacement, no year of their life lost to paperwork and repairs.

Everybody in that chain benefits from the same work, and nobody is paying for someone else’s win. That is why the footage was easy to shoot and why the day was worth filming. Twenty-five years in, the argument is still the same one the founders made: fewer losses, and the losses that do happen cost less.

Two films came out of that day, and both are on ICLR’s own channel.

DIRECTOR / PRODUCER / EDITOR · BRYAN BAKKER

Both films are published on our own channel. We can show where they live; the record does not attest what is in them.