Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation has been named the winner of the 2015 MoMA/PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York. Selected from five finalists, Jaque and his team designed a “movable artifact” called COSMO. The temporary, outdoor installation will occupy the courtyard at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, during the summer music series “Warm Up.”
The spectacular tropical spaceship-gazebo-on-wheels will provide shade, seating, and water via customized irrigation components “to make visible and enjoyable the so-far hidden urbanism of pipes we live by.” It will gather people together in an environment as pleasant and climatically comfortable as a garden and as visually textured as a mirrored disco ball, providing a unique backdrop for the Warm Up series. The landscape utilizes advanced environmental design to filter and purify 3,000 gallons of water.
Besides the atmospheric nature of the construction, COSMO raises awareness about (clean) water scarcity. The United Nations, estimates that by 2025, two-thirds of the global population will live in countries that lack sufficient water. COSMO is also reproducible, serving as a prototype that could be built around the world to purify water. The stretched-out plastic mesh at the core of the construction will glow whenever its water has been purified, lighting up the party in the middle of the courtyard.
“This year’s proposal takes one of the Young Architects Program’s essential requirements– providing a water feature for leisure and fun–and highlights water itself as a scarce resource,” said Pedro Gadanho, Curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design. “Relying on off-the-shelf components from agro-industrial origin, an exuberant mobile architecture celebrates water-purification processes and turns their intricate visualization into an unusual backdrop for the Warm Up sessions.”
The other finalists for this year’s MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program were brillhart architecture (Jacob Brillhart), Erin Besler, The Bittertang Farm (Michael Loverich) and Studio Benjamin Dillenburger (Benjamin Dillenburger and Michael Hansmeyer). COSMO opens at MoMA PS1 in late June, and an exhibition of the five finalists’ proposed projects will be on view at MoMA over the summer, organized by Pedro Gadanho, Curator, with Leah Barreras, Department Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA.