image © andrés jaque-office for political innovation

The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 announce Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation as the winner of the annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York. Now in its 16th edition, the Young Architects Program at MoMA and MoMA PS1 has been committed to offering emerging architectural talent the opportunity to design and present innovative projects, challenging each year’s winners to develop creative designs for a temporary, outdoor installation at MoMA PS1 that provides shade, seating, and water. The architects must also work within guidelines that address environmental issues, including sustainability and recycling. Andrés Jaque, drawn from among five finalists, will design a temporary urban landscape for the 2015 Warm Up summer music series in MoMA PS1’s outdoor courtyard.

The winning project, COSMO opens at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City in late June. This year’s unique construction, 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.

image ©andrés jaque-office for political innovation

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.

“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.”

Klaus Biesenbach, MoMA PS1 Director and MoMA Chief Curator at Large adds “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.”

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). 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.

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