According to the World Water Council, 1.1 billion people around the world currently live without access to clean drinking water, and the United Nations predicts that 1,800 million people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity by 2025. COSMO, which was the winning submission in MoMA PS1‘s 2015 Young Architects Program Competition to design a temporary pavilion for the museum’s courtyard, seeks to raise awareness around those staggering statistics. The contest, now in its 16th year, stipulates that a water feature be included in the selected pavilion design, but Jaque decided to take it a step further and make the process of water filtration the main focus of his team’s creation.

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In addition to providing shade and seating for visitors during PS1’s summer concerts, COSMO will be hard at work pumping water through customized irrigation components, engineered with the help of BAC Engineering and Consultancy, that can filter about 3,000 gallons of water every four days. The purification process will be made visible to partygoers via a bright light within the elasticized plastic mesh at the center of the ecosystem that will glow at the end of each water filtration cycle.

Jaque hopes that COSMO will continue to serve as a replicable model for large-scale water filtration after its temporary stay at PS1 ends in the fall.

COSMO will be on view at MoMA PS1 through September 7, 2015.

+ MoMA PS1

+ Andrés Jacques/Office for Political Innovation

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