Building Resilience Out of Air: Reimagining a Typology of Thin Shell Air-formed Shelters

Abstract

In recent decades, a novel form of disaster architecture has emerged on grade-school campuses across the U.S. Midwest and Gulf Coast as thin-shell concrete monolithic domes. Constructed using pneumatic formwork, these FEMA-rated domes possess exceptional structural capacity to resist catastrophic loads, serving an everyday function for schools, most often as gymnasiums, while doubling as public shelters during high-wind events. This typology demonstrates a form of resilient architecture that is anticipatory rather than reactionary, permanent rather than temporary, and multipurpose rather than single purpose. However, structural optimization has overshadowed all other possibilities, producing spaces that privilege performance at the expense of experience. Historically, pneumatic and surface structures pushed the limits of architectural imagination, yet these structures have fallen into banal repetition. Heavy, bunker-like, and spatially austere, contemporary disaster shelters are more often utilitarian than visionary. While windowless hollow forms are an effective approach as a brief reactionary response, anticipatory architecture has an untapped potential to create shelters that provide dignity and comfort to a community in and beyond crisis. This thesis explores the possibility of building resilience out of air by reimagining FEMA-rated dome shelters through the experimental spirit of Frei Otto, Dante Bini, and Heinz Isler. Through a physical form-finding process that employs strategically restrained pneumatic forms to create solid casts, it investigates the unrealized formal and spatial potential of pneumatic formwork construction. Maintaining the community-scale and construction logic of existing FEMA domes, this research challenges the typology’s structural and programmatic conventions, proposing imaginative shelters that unite daily use and disaster preparedness with the aim of fostering resilient communities.