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Apologies if this is a duplicate posting, but several people told me they
did not receive my notice even though it is in my out-box for having been
sent at 11:35 this morning.<br><br>
At 11:35 AM 3/6/2008, Debbie Meinbresse wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""><b>Please join us next
Wednesday, March 12th, for an STS Colloquium co-sponsored with MIT's
Space Policy and Society Research Group:<br><br>
<div align="center"><font size=5 color="#0000FF">The Urban Space
Station<br><br>
</font><font size=5>Natalie Jeremijenko<br>
</font><font size=4>Environmental Health Clinic, New York
University<br><br>
5:30 pm, MIT, Bartos Theater (lower level of E15)<br><br>
</b></font></div>
<u>Abstract<br>
</u>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?<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<u>Bio<br>
</u>Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist whose background includes studies in
biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering.
Jeremijenko’s 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.<br><br>
Jeremijenko directs the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic
[<a href="http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/</a>]. 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.<br><br>
See you next Wednesday at 5:30! </blockquote>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
Debbie Meinbresse<br>
STS Program, MIT<br>
617-452-2390<br>
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