ANDRES JAQUE/Office of Political Innovation
4:30pm | Wednesday, April 22
School of Architecture, N-107
The Princeton-Mellon Forum for Research on the Urban Environment will host a talk by Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation) on his current work with comments by D. Graham Burnett (Princeton, History of Science).
Andrés Jaque's COSMO (on display at MoMA PS1 from June 23, 2015—September 7, 2015) is a moveable artifact, made out of customized irrigation components, to make visible and enjoyable the so-far hidden urbanism of pipes we live by. An assemblage of ecosystems, based on advanced environmental design, COSMO is 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. It takes four days for the 3,000 gallons of water to become purified, then the cycle continues with the same body of water, becoming more purified with every cycle.
Andrés Jaque addresses the statistic put forth by the United Nations, estimating that by 2025 two thirds of the global population will live in countries that lack sufficient water. COSMO is designed as both an offline and an online prototype. Its purpose is to trigger awareness, and to be easily reproduced all around the world, giving people access to drinking water, and to a dialogue about it. But above all, COSMO will be a party-artifact moving in whatever direction the party happens to take it.
As a result of Andrés Jaque’s complex and advanced biochemical design, the stretched-out plastic mesh at the core of the construction will glow automatically whenever its water has been purified. In the stone courtyard of MoMA PS1, the party will literally light up every time the environment is protected providing a dynamic backdrop for the Warm Up summer music series. It will gather people together in an environment as pleasant and climatically comfortable as a garden as visually textured as a mirrored disco ball.
