[Sci-tech-public] March 12 @ 5:30: Natalie Jeremijenko -- The Urban Space Station

[Debbie Meinbresse]

Please join us next Wednesday, 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. 
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.

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 next Wednesday at 5:30! 
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