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

[Debbie Meinbresse]

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.

At 11:35 AM 3/6/2008, Debbie Meinbresse wrote:
>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!

Debbie Meinbresse
STS Program, MIT
617-452-2390
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