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Design

Mirrored Disco Ball Wins MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program

Visitors to this year's 2015 Warm Up summer music series at MoMA PS1 will get to party inside a moving, glowing water-purifier.

Rendering of Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation’s COSMO, winning design of the 2015 Young Architects Program. The Museum of Modern Art and MoMAPS1. Image courtesy of Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation.

It isn't easy to follow up acts like a nanoparticle-encrusted polygon equipped with water cannons, nor a sustainable, 10,000 brick mushroom tower, but this year's winner of the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1's Young Architects Program (YAP) does so in fine form. For the 16th edition of the architecture competition, COSMO, Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation's design for a "temporary urban landscape" to fill the MoMA PS1’s outdoor courtyard for their 2015 Warm Up summer music series is like a giant, glowing, mirrored disco ball that has the ability to purify its own water.

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Selected from five finalists, Jaque's winning submission is a moveable structure made out of irrigation pipes. "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," explains MoMA. "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."

Says Klaus Biesenbach, MoMA PS1 Director and MoMA Chief Curator at Large, “Last year HyFi, 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 structure tackles the United Nations' estimate that "by 2025 two thirds of the global population will live in countries that lack sufficient water." The result is a prototype that exists to be easily reproduced both offline and online, providing both a dialogue around and acces to drinking water. MoMA is also careful to note that it isn't all serious business, stating that, "COSMO will be a party-artifact moving in whatever direction the party happens to take it," and will feature a plastic mesh core at its center that will glow whenever water has been successfully purified. Basically, it's a colossal future structure designed to "gather people together in an environment as pleasant and climatically comfortable as a garden as visually textured as a mirrored disco ball."

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Rendering of Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation’s COSMO, winning design of the 2015 Young Architects Program. The Museum of Modern Art and MoMAPS1. Image courtesy of Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation.

Click here to learn more about COSMO.

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