MoMA PS1 Selects Andrés Jaque for YAP Installation

John Hill

6. februari 2015

Image courtesy of Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation.

Office for Political Innovation, a Madrid- and New York-based practice directed by Andrés Jaque, has won the 16th edition of MoMA PS1's Young Architects Program with COSMO.

The annual competition asks invited entrants to design a temporary installation that provides shade, seating, and water for the summer months in the museum's courtyard. Further guidelines about addressing environmental issues appears to have drive Jaque's office in their proposal, as described in a statement from MoMA PS1:

"COSMO will be 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."

Further, COSMO is designed as a prototype, able to be easily reproduced all around the world to give people access to drinking water. Nevertheless, given that the installation is a backdrop for MoMA PS1's popular Warm Up music series, COSMO turns the environmental features of the design into a spectacle: "The stretched-out plastic mesh at the core of the construction will glow automatically whenever its water has been purified," per the museum's statement. COSMO will open in late June, when MoMA will display the projects of the five finalists.