Abstract Recept post-disaster studies have highlighted deficiencies in the design and construction of low buildings for wind such as a lack of structural systems to transmit wind loads to the foundations and poor connection details. A lack of conviction, in some circles of the construction industry, of the real effect of wind loads on building appears to have contributed to widespread damage, often during storms with wind speeds below those specified for design. A technique developed using models scaled to fail under wind tunnel wind loading allows some simple structural failure mechanisms of low buildings to be illustrated and also provides simple quantitative comparison of the effect of a multitude of parameters on the overall performance.