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
Readymades Belong to Everyone

Location: Swiss Institute / Contemporary Art New York 
Date: June 23–August 19, 2018

Swiss Institute Architecture and Design Series: 3rd Edition
READYMADES BELONG TO EVERYONE
Curated by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen
June 23–August 19, 2018

 

Including works by Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu, Lutz Bacher, Alan Belcher, Daniella Betta, Petra Blaisse / Inside Outside, Jennifer Bolande, Arno Brandlhuber, LaKela Brown, Merlin Carpenter, Caruso St John, Christo, Alain Clairet, Claire Fontaine, Maria Eichhorn, Sylvie Fleury with Lady Pink, Wade Guyton, Trix and Robert Haussmann, Koo Jeong A, Pierre Joseph, Christian Kerez, Rem Koolhaas, Lacaton & Vassal, Adriana Lara, Klara Lidén, Ken Lum, Mathieu Malouf, Chloe Maratta, Lucy McKenzie, Sveta Mordovskaya, MOS Architects, Kaspar Müller, OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, Cedric Price, Cecilia Puga, Smiljan Radic, Emanuel Rossetti, Aldo Rossi, Sauter von Moos in collaboration with Herzog & de Meuron, Sergison Bates Architects, Ser Serpas, Richard Sides & Gili Tal, Lena Tutunjian, Flannery Silva, Reena Spaulings, Jan Vorisek, Martin Wong, Lena Youkhana, Heimo Zobernig.

 

With public programs by Adjustments Agency, Yuji Agematsu, Germane Barnes, Eva Díaz, David J. Getsy, Gordon Hall, Helen Molesworth, David K. Ross, Nathan Silver, Martino Stierli, Aurora Tang of The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Jan Vorisek and more.

Swiss Institute is delighted to announce the third edition of its Architecture and Design Series, entitled READYMADES BELONG TO EVERYONE. This marks the inaugural exhibition at SI’s new home in the heart of the East Village, located at 38 St Marks Pl. Curated by Niels Olsen and Fredi Fischli, directors of exhibitions in the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, READYMADES BELONG TO EVERYONE features more than 50 artists, architects and collectives from 16 countries with 17 new commissions. The exhibition extends contemporary understandings of the readymade, as it has filtered through histories of art, design and architecture to become mutated, redoubled, and accelerated in urban environments of commerce and control.

It has been more than a century since Marcel Duchamp reorganized aesthetic categories with his seminal Fountain (1917), creating new attention to context and found or manufactured materials. By the 1980s, such artistic conversations had evolved into strategies of appropriation even more explicitly associated with critique, especially in regard to mass- produced objects and commercial imagery. During that decade, the immediate neighborhood of Swiss Institute’s new location in the East Village became an epicenter of experimentation with readymade forms: David Hammons sold snowballs to passersby in his Bliz-aard Ball Sale on Cooper Square in 1983; and works by artists such as Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, and Jennifer Bolande, featuring everyday items, were shown at galleries such as International with Monument, started by artists Kent Klamen, Elizabeth Koury, and Meyer Vaisman, and Nature Morte, run by artists Peter Nagy and Alan Belcher. The project from which this exhibition takes its name, readymades belong to everyone®, founded by artist Philippe Thomas, also debuted nearby in 1987, when Cable Gallery was transformed into a public relations agency that adopted the modes of advertising production for art. This exhibition includes works “produced” by the agency, in which collectors were transferred authorship of the work that they purchased.

Just as Duchamp was responding to the rise of industrial production with his readymades, so too were architects reflecting on the reality of the machine age in their work. For Le Corbusier, the objet trouvé of the steamboat became the ultimate ideal for architecture, a fetishization of the innovation made by engineers in this time. Later, Alison and Peter Smithson formulated their own concept of the “as found” in architecture, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi published Learning from Las Vegas (1972), and Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver established a manifesto for improvisation with Adhocism (1972).

Drawing on these overlapping histories, READYMADES BELONG TO EVERYONE creates a cityscape of readymade objects, staging an urban environment that emphasizes issues of security, real estate and surreality and echoes everyday life in many of today’s major metropolitan areas. Architectural contributions that employ readymade forms and styles as political or playful gestures include Rem Koolhaas’s Field Trip (1971), which takes the Berlin Wall as a found object of study, and Aldo Rossi’s Prototype for a Cabina (1981), which uses avernacular beach hut as a model. To reflect the contemporary role of the readymade in architecture, the exhibition draws upon recent practices such as Lacaton Vassal’s appropriation of an existing industrial building for the FRAC museum in Dunkerque and Smiljan Radic’s use of found objects in models. Notional readymades employed by artists in the exhibition include street performers, garbled t-shirts aimed at tourists and teenagers, and the branding of international hotel chains. Jennifer Bolande’s Conjunction Assemblage (1988) constructs hi-rise architecture from appliances associated with domestic labor, while videos by Lucy McKenzie and Lena Youkhana present subversive variations on the property tour.

As the first exhibition in Swiss Institute’s new building, READYMADES BELONG TO EVERYONE includes objects that belong to both interior and exterior spaces, creating a transitive zone in which viewers quickly pass through markers of institutions, corporations and homes. Shifts in scale and time period are also employed throughout. In this disorientation, the exhibition creates a model of the contemporary city, a readymade in itself.