Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation wins the 2015 Young Architects Program at MoMA
MoMA PS1 has just announced the winning design for this year’s Young Architects Program (YAP), which will be featured this summer in the Long Island City museum’s outdoor courtyard, setting the stage for the Warm Up summer music series. The top spot goes to Andrés Jaque of the Office for Political Innovation for COSMO: Give me a pipe and I will move/celebrate the Earth, a moveable environmental artifact made out of customized irrigation components that will make visible and enjoyable the typically hidden urbanism of pipes.
According to MoMA PS1, 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.”
This is the 16th year for the YAP design competition, which highlights emerging architectural talent. The temporary outdoor installations must provide shade, seating and water and follow guidelines that address environmental issues, including sustainability and recycling. Andrés Jaque tackled these requirements by looking at the United Nations’ estimate that by 2025 two thirds of the world will live in countries that lack sufficient water. COSMO‘s purpose is to bring awareness to the issue and to serve as a prototype for something that can be easily replicated around the world, providing access to clean drinking water. At the installation’s core is stretched-out plastic mesh that will glow whenever the water has become purified, illuminating the MoMA Ps1 party like a biochemical disco ball.
Last year’s winner ‘Hy-Fi’ by David Benjamin/The Living, the world’s first large-scale structure made of mushroom bricks
Andrés Jaque was one of five finalists in this year’s competition. The others are brillhart architecture (Jacob Brillhart), Erin Besler, Bittertang Farm (Michael Loverich), and Studio Benjamin Dillenburger (Benjamin Dillenburger and Michael Hansmeyer). All five of the proposed projects will be exhibited over the summer at MoMA, and the winning design will take shape in late June.
[Related: A Glittering Tower Built from Mushrooms Rises in the MoMA PS1 Courtyard]
“Cosmo” images © Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation
