Please join us tomorrow, March 12th, for an STS
Colloquium co-sponsored with MIT's Space Policy and Society Research Group:
The Urban Space Station
Natalie Jeremijenko
Environmental Health Clinic, New York University
5:30 pm, MIT, Bartos Theater (lower level of E15)
Abstract
What would a bomb/fallout shelter for the
climate crisis be like? Shelters were an
exceptional practice, erected quickly by the
civic sector, and a very local response to an
uncertain collective threat. They remain as
icons of a sort of the mobilization that
achieved with the urgency and exceptional
conditions of the war, and provide a comparison
to the contemporary civic responses climate
crisis (such as change your lightbulb, drive at
the speed limit, buy local lettuce). Who
designed, built, funded, and deployed those
shelters, for whom, and what would one look like
now, one that addressed the contemporary threats?
The UrbanSpaceStation (USS) explores this
question. The USS is a device designed to
sequester the carbon dioxide emissions from
buildings (which account for 80% carbon dioxide
emissions in Manhattan and 35% of the national
average) and return oxygen-enriched air to the
building. It provides an intensive urban
agriculture facility, coupling and reusing
building waste streams locally, and potentially
providing significant food. Called the USS
because it appropriates materials, power
generation and closed system engineering of
space stations to significantly increase the
environmental performance of urban buildings, it
creates new urban space that can service a 10x
building volume. The Trusset Space-frame and
ETFE system is designed to be built and deployed
as a barn raising, rather than through the
traditional construction industry and
pre-engineered to require no substantial
structural modification of support building,
circumvent permitting and perform in 100-year
storm events; the USS nonetheless operates at a
scale of small collectives (of students for
instance) and in a DIY tradition. Maximizing
participation in the deployment is an investment
in the distributed capacity to improve, maintain
and redesign these systems. The designs details are presented and discussed.
Bio
Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist whose
background includes studies in biochemistry,
physics, neuroscience and precision engineering.
Jeremijenkos projects-which explore
socio-technical change-have been exhibited by
several museums and galleries, including the
MASSMoCA, the Whitney, Smithsonian
Cooper-Hewitt. A 1999 Rockefeller Fellow, she
was recently named one of the 40 most
influential designers by I.D. Magazine.
Jeremijenko is the director of the environmental
health clinic at NYU, assistant professor in
Art, and affiliated with the Computer Science Department.
Jeremijenko directs the xDesign Environmental
Health Clinic
[http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/]. The
Environmental Health Clinic develops and
prescribes locally optimized and often playful
strategies to effect remediation of
environmental systems, producing measurable and
mediagenic evidence and coordinating diverse
projects to effective material change.
See you tomorrow at 5:30!
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