Selected Publications and Exhibitions
Office Statement

If given the choice between staring blankly into space or reading architects’ office statements on their website, we choose the first. They all say the same thing: we’re sustainable, responsible with budgets, experienced, award-winning, etc. . . . The game seems to be how to say nothing in particular and comfort any worries of someone contemplating hiring you. After a few clicks, it’s hard not to think that all this quote-unquote professionalism is very cold at its core. We can’t tell you exactly when MOS started. We like to say it was 2003, sometimes we say 2005, but we were drifting from place to place, we didn’t have an office space then and our name was !@#?, which we quickly found was too difficult to use because 1. you couldn’t pronounce it and 2. you couldn’t get a Web address. In 2008, we were licensed and became a legal entity, but we had already had an office and made some buildings. At some point, we drifted towards MOS—an acronym of our names and reflection of a shared desire to be horizontal and fuzzy, as opposed to tall and shiny. We began around an oversized table, a surface for collecting, gathering, and working through a range of design experiments—a make-believe of architectural fantasies, problems, and thoughts. We are now located in New York, we have grown a little, but remain around a large table, working together on each project through playful experimentation and serious research. We have won some awards. We have written some books. We have built some buildings. We are currently making more. This website indexes that work: housing; schools; houses; cultural institutions; retail; exhibition design; installations; furniture; objects; books; writing; software experiments; and videos.

 

— Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample

Project Index
General Information
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226 W 135th St. NY, NY 10030
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Selected Awards
2019

Houses for Sale receives AIGA “50 Books” Award

2019

MOS receives an AIA New York State Honor Award for School No. 3 (Petite École)

2014

Krabbesholm Højskole (Denmark) is awarded an AIA NY Excellence Award
    
MOS receives an AIA New York Award of Merit for Element House

Flat File

We draw, talk, email, doodle, diagram, render, print, print, draw, model, receive, distribute, call, approve, confirm, reject, plead, deny, laugh, export, import, present, listen, order, zoom, script, post, pan, copy, paste, scale, collate, staple, eat, list, drink, walk, draw, chat, meet, photograph, crop, calculate, draw, adjust, tweak, sip, solve, stack, note, organize, scan, edit, review, print, question, comment, make, sketch . . . and occasionally we store them in a flat file.

MOS: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert, Charles Dorrance-King, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Matthew Acer, ...

© MOS Architects PLLC

Web site by Studio Lin 

Programming by Brazen

Thank you to all those who have worked with us over the years: 


Michael Abel, Victoria Abel, Marc Acciari, Matthew Acer, Adam Ainsley, Omar Ali, Matthew Allen, Siobhan Allman, Kristy Almond, Andrew Atwood, Katy Barkan, Ryan Barney, Jonas Barre, Ashley Bigham, Heather Bizon, Ryan Bollom, Jason Bond, Tim Brennan, Lasha Brown, Benas Burdulis, Chad Burke, Michelle Chang, Yam Chumpolphaisal, Jacob Comerci, Taylor Cornelson, Robert Crabtree, Russell Crader, Zac Culbreth, Ryan Culligan, Gideon Danilowitz, David Delgado, Leigha Dennis, Phillip Denny, Ivi Diamantopoulou, Cyrus Dochow, Ian Donnelly, Charles Dorrance-King, Esra Durukan, Cecily Eckhardt, Ceri Edmunds, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Fauzia Evanindya, Michael Faciejew, Fancheng Fei, David Fenster, Jose Miguel Ahedo Fernandez, Darby Foreman, Justin Fowler, Andrew Frame, Griffin Frazen, Michaela Friedberg, Paul Frederickson, Forest Fulton, Judy Sue Fulton, Yann Gay-Crossier, Steve Gertner, Fabiana Godoy, Marti Gottsch, Nile Greenberg, Simon Greenwold, Jerome Haferd, Helen Han, Thomas Heltzel, Fred Holt, Elliott Hodges, Kai Hotson, Steve Huang, Justin Huxol, Sarah Iwata, Maciej Kaczynski, Mark Kamish, Alexandra Karlsson, Jeremy Keagy, Martin Kedzior, Tessa Kelly, Yair Keshet, Jason Kim, Stefan Klecheski, Brandt Knapp, Lukasz Kos, Kera Lagios, Jimenez Lai, Man-Yan Lam, Nicola Laursen-Schmidt, Taekyoung Lee,  Cara Liberatore, Joanna Ligas, Kate Lisi, Clair Logoz, Jaron Lubin, Ryan Ludwig, William Macfarlane, Lorenzo Marasso, Gabrielle Marcoux, Steve Martinez, Meredith McDaniel, Patrick McGowen, Zane Mechem, Julia Muntean, Magdalena Naydekova, Zosia Nowakowska, Griffin Ofiesh, DK Osseo-Assare, Miriam Peterson, Elijah Porter, Jericho Prater, Jason Pytko, Andy Rauchut, Carson Russell, Paul Ruppert, Laura Salazar, Shu-Chang, Zach Seibold, Temple Simpson, Carter Skemp, Michael Smith, Zachary Snyder, Igsung So, Niko Stahl, Rudolph Stahl, Ian Starling, Mathew Staudt, Joel Stewart, Sara Stevens, Liza Stiff, Julia Suh, James Tate, Chat Travieso, George Valdes, Geoff von Oeyon, Phi Van Phan, Sarah Wagner, Yshai Yudekovitz, John Yurchyk ...  

 

 

 

Exhibition
“No-Thing,” an exploration in aporetic architectural furniture

Location: Friedman Benda, New York, New York
Date: January 18–April 14, 2018

The newly commissioned contemporary objects in this show at Friedman Benda, created by nine distinct architectural studios, all share a non-dogmatic approach to object creation. Defined by a common reliance on their imagined users, these objects do not impose a closed set of values, but rather depend on their subjects for completion and on the “third voice” that emerges in the in- betweenness of the object-subject relationship. It is in this space that the object emerges as such, as a no-thing—a term defined by R.D. Laing in The Politics of Experience. A no-thing situates itself between its users’ varied perspectives, educations, backgrounds, organizations, group- loyalties, affiliations, ideologies, socio-economic class interests, temperaments, and the architects’ open-ended project. In Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno detects this “nonidentity” between concept and reality, escaping any possible sensuous apprehension, living outside the world of objects, yet leaving a trace behind. We, the users, when confronted with no- things, are captured by the existence of something present but missing, something deliberately taken from us, which we are eager to know more about. The no-thing’s denial haunts us and grips us tightly. In our thoroughly commodified environment, where goods are harder and harder to singularize, we might better forget about traditional semiotic relationships between signifier/signified, and instead begin to concentrate on the non-authoritarian character of the ‘no- thing’, its egalitarian in-betweenness. Indeed, it is through objects like the ones in the exhibition that the space necessary for the construction of a new self in society can emerge. Not a utopian, idealized self, but an ambiguous figure, uncertain of its destiny; as uncertain as these aporetic furniture works.

 

Within this framework, where the objects truly emerge through affect, one is urged to take not solely a passive but an active role. Firstly, by reconsidering the Foucauldian notion of the “care of the self,”—both collectively and individually—thus paving the way for new ethical considerations and the exercise of freedoms, vis-à-vis ritualistic, domestic activities that engage one in a deeper self-consciousness of one’s bodies. These activities are clearly evident in the work proposed by MILLIØNS, which liberates the corpus to navigate freely, but also in the work of Leong Leong and Ania Jaworska, where objects unleash the body by challenging established archetypal notions around the positioning of furniture in the domestic landscape. Spatial regards are also channeled through a play of optics in Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s guillotine double- workstation, which goes beyond the purely rational Durerian apparatus grasping, into the sphere of the irrational and utterances of what is beyond apprehensible. Continuing the walk throughout the gallery, one confronts Andy and Dave’s set of objects, where, if one had previously seen space infinitely extended, now one sees a topological collapse through the abstraction of specific, re-contextualized moments of the city. This mimetic approach becomes even more evident (to the point of ironic self-mockery) in the impressionistic approach of Norman Kelly, which rejects the ‘shock-of-the-new’ vulgar strategy of late capitalism, and instead pushes one (as one pull’s back) to find in one’s memories traces of past stylistic references, tricking one through ambiguity to discover the different “masked” typologies of objects. Moving further along, one finds MOS’s seemingly conventional table. Part of their Model Furniture series—a set of works that take architects' reproductions of furniture in scale models as a starting point for the development of new, full-scale furniture—this table is built on a photo, of a reproduction by another architect. Finished in a glittery black, MOS's table makes this structure, its endless copies and reproductions of reproductions, into something else. Finally, the show ends with a subtle gesture towards ontological concerns, in architecten de vylder vinck taillieu’s lounge chair. Poetically made out of what could, at first sight, be seen as a set of architectural materials resting casually in a construction site, this work is the perfect exemplification of the kind of dialogical relationship this show aspires to and I described above: a humble suggestion to re-assess our material world by bringing forth a new way to imagine our bond to the things around us.

- Juan García Mosqueda

 

Curated by Juan García Mosqueda.

Photo: Daniel Kukla, courtesy of Friedman Benda and the artists