Towering Network of Water-purifying Pipes

Andrés Jaque's giant water purifier unveiled in MoMA PS1 courtyard, designed to serve as a portable water-filtration plant

Jaque and his firm Office for Political Innovation were the winners of the 2015 Young Architects Program (YAP), which invites emerging architects to create a temporary structure for the courtyard at PS1, a contemporary art institution affiliated with New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Jaque's installation, called Cosmo, is designed to serve as a portable water-filtration plant.

More than 2 billion gallons of water circulate every day beneath New York City," said the firm. "Cosmo is a movable artefact, made out of customised irrigation components, to make visible and enjoyable the so-far hidden urbanism of pipes we live by."

The installation, which opened yesterday, consists of a towering network of circular pipes set within a web of plastic tubes. At the base of the structure, cylinders filled with plants and water sit on wheeled platforms. Dangling from lower portions of the web are additional plants in clear, bulbous containers.

Polluted water supplied by the city's environmental protection department will continuously flow through the system. The water "has been engineered to represent the average pollution level of used water that is discharged from the East River," explained Jaque, citing the waterway that runs between Queens and Manhattan.

The system will purify the water by eliminating suspended particles and nitrates, balancing PH levels, and increasing the amount of dissolved oxygen. It will take four days for 3,000 gallons of water (11,350 litres) to complete one purification cycle.

Plastic mesh at the base of the installation will glow automatically when a purification cycle is finished. "With Cosmo, the party is literally lit up every time the environment is being protected," said the studio.

The concept stemmed from a desire to address the issue of water shortages. The firm cites a United Nations statistic estimating that two-thirds of the global population will live in areas without sufficient water by the year 2025.

"Our office is focused on exploring the political role of architecture," Jaque told Dezeen. "The infrastructures by which we define how we relate to nature tend to be hidden domains reserved to experts: water treatment plants, reservoirs, electricity production facilities."

"All of them are so important to defining the way our societies get organised, but they are not spaces to be inhabited. We think there is a great potential to turn them into inhabitable spaces."

Cosmo is meant to trigger awareness and dialogue about water shortages and to serve as a prototype that can be reproduced around the world. It's also intended to be a "party artefact" that goes "wherever the party happens".

Source: Dezeen

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• Purification
• Technology
• Pipes Design