Gensler (Stone Soup Group)


AIR SUPPORT: A Resilience Hub for Vulnerable Communities
Increasingly frequent extreme weather events create urban heat islands, rising utility bills, and power outages as our aging, fossil-fuel-powered infrastructure attempts to cope with the new normal. In cities, these disasters disproportionately affect under-resourced communities—often those of color. Air Support addresses longstanding, urban environmental inequities through the creation of a community oasis or resilience hub: a place of refuge to ride out the damage, displacement, and related trauma caused by severe climate events. It is also designed to provide a place of enjoyment and access to resources on more typical days—serving as a pre-emergency reservoir of resources such as food, micro-mobility hub, wellness, and educational or technological services.
Air Support consists of an off-the-shelf storage matrix intended to house basic needs (first aid supplies, water, food, bedding, etc.) and a renewable-powered community battery. This battery will provide neighborhood safety lighting and charging capabilities for WiFi, electronic devices, and last-mile vehicles during non-emergency periods. During outages and spans of extreme heat or cold, the battery powers a unit that ventilates, heats, or cools the air inside an air-inflated membrane that can be deployed as a temporary shelter. When not in use, the components are stored in a portable shipping container that doubles as an outdoor shading device. In both good times and challenging ones, Air Support’s striking shape and color will make it a community beacon.
Air Support is designed as a prototype, capable of and intended to be brought to scale. Accordingly, it is displayed here as it is being deployed in, and adapted to, four cities subject to distinct climate threats: Chicago (heat/cold); Los Angeles (earthquakes, fires, heat/drought); Houston (heat, floods/torrential rain); and Newark (storm surges, torrential rain). Community-based organizations will serve as critical partners to identifying locations and activating these hubs. In Chicago, the prototype is proposed as a collaborative endeavor, to be refined in partnership with the Englewood community on the city’s South Side. The prototype hopefully will be operated and maintained on a vacant lot belonging to Antioch Baptist Church for the benefit of the community’s most vulnerable neighbors—not just during extreme weather but to provide everyday services.
Past Works

Rollout, Autonomous Vehicle Exhibition Pavilion

SWITCH!street furniture prototype

Urban Awning Housing
