COSMO
Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation
Architects: Andrés Jaque Architects / Office for Political Innovation Location: PS1 MoMA, New York, US Year: 2015 Photography Director: Imagen Subliminal, Miguel de Guzmán
More than 2 billion gallons of water circulate every day beneath New York City.
COSMO is a movable 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, 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.
The United Nations estimates that by 2025 two-thirds of the global population will live incountries that lack sufficient water.
COSMO is designed as both an offline and an online prototype. Its purpose is to trigger awareness, to be easily reproduced all around the world, giving people access to drinking water, and to a dialogue about it.
But above all, COSMO is a party-artifact that goes wherever the party is. It is a device meant to gather people together – as pleasant and climatically comfortable as a garden and, at the same time, as visually rich as a mirrored disco ball. As a result of a complex biochemical design, its stretched-out plastic mesh glows automatically whenever its water has been purified.
With COSMO, the party is literally lit up every time the environment is being protected.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.