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Water purifier design selected for MoMA PS1’s 2015 Warm Up music series

Rendering of Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation’s COSMO, winning design of the 2015 Young Architects Program.
Images courtesy of Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation

This summer, MoMA PS1 will glow with awareness during its annual music series.

The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 in Long Island City have selected architect Andrés Jaque and his firm, the Office for Political Innovation, as the winner of the 16th annual Young Architects Program (YAP).

In Jaque’s project, called COSMO, he addresses the United Nation’s statistic estimating that by 2025 two thirds of the global population will live in countries that have a shortage of water.

The winning design expected to open at MoMA PS1’s courtyard in late June, was chosen from five finalists to serve as the temporary urban landscape for the 2015 Warm Up summer music series. The project is mobile, moving with the partygoers, and is made out of customized irrigation mechanisms.

Every year the winners develop creative designs for a temporary outdoor installation at the museum located at 22-25 Jackson Ave. that would provide shade, seating and water to those who attend the series. The architects also have to address environmental issues, such as sustainability and recycling.

“Last year, ‘Hy-Fi,’ a nearly zero carbon footprint construction by The Living, raised awareness of ecological and climate change. This year COSMO continues to do so, addressing the issue of increasingly scarce water supplies worldwide in a successful and innovative way,” said Klaus Biesenbach, MoMA PS1 director and MoMA chief curator at large.

COSMO has been engineered to filter and purify 3,000 gallons of water, “eliminating suspended particles and nitrates, balancing the PH, and increasing the level of dissolved oxygen,” according to MoMA PS1. It takes a total of four days for the 3,000 gallons to be purified..

As part of Jacque’s biochemical design, the stretched-out plastic mesh at the core of COSMO will automatically glow whenever water is purified.

“Relying on off-the-shelf components from agro-industrial origin, exuberant mobile architecture celebrates water-purification processes and turns their intricate visualization into an unusual backdrop for the Warm Up sessions,” said Pedro Gadanho, curator in MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design.

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