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
Visit:
226 W 135th St. NY, NY 10030
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866 431 3928
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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 ...  

 

 

 

Book
An Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures without Architecture
Title:
An Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures without Architecture
Price:
$85

Ask anyone, “What do architects do?” and most will reply, “Architects draw buildings.” They will likely imagine a myopic figure, often dressed in black, huddled at her or his desk, obsessing over details. This image is not all wrong, but architects also draw, add, copy, or notate people to go along with everything we make. It is impossible to represent architecture without representing the human. Even when the human presence is intentionally left out or is reduced to a faceless set of measurements, it haunts architecture in its absence. As such, the point of this book, An Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures without Architecture, is to collect various architects’ representations of life into a single document. We began  this project with no strong methodology other than to cast a wide net, scouring both library and Internet to collect drawings by architects we knew to produce significant buildings and drawings or those we simply thought of at the time. Then we deleted the architecture and context of these representations to focus specifically on the humans depicted by various architects or architecture offices. If we found nothing, we noted as much. While compiling all of these images, we were surprised to find that many architects simply do not represent people. Equally surprising, we found that architects who arguably have or claim nothing in common sometimes share an attitude toward scale figures (or a lack thereof). Perhaps the absence of such figures is evidence of desires for the so-called posthuman; perhaps including people simply would have obscured representation of the architecture; or perhaps the architects just didn’t get to it. Throughout the Encyclopedia one can find architects who represent the human as inchoate scribbles, draw them by hand, exaggerate features, create a style, emphasize the geometric or mechanical aspects of bodies … And architects who reference other scale figures, collage themselves as scale figures, make political statements, want to portray a mood or attitude, want to make the human as uninteresting as possible, show only backsides or only silhouettes, are eclectic, and so on. One can also see the relationship to media and technology through how architects represent people: in gaussy, transparent Photoshop silhouettes; models collaged from lifestyle glossies and on-the-street fashion blogs; soft charcoal smudge-sketches; watercolors; full-color graphic illustrations; etcetera. We tried to include broad-ranging examples; but, when skimming the Encyclopedia, please accept our apologies for those offices and buildings we have neglected to include. We did what we could to be as inclusive as possible within the relatively narrow medium of architectural publications. After all, the point was never to be complete—an impossibility nowadays—but rather to be as broad as could be managed within our given resources. And we tried. We collected over 1,000 figures produced by over 250 architects, and (with a few exceptions) we present every figure at the same scale. Scale figures are a fundamental part of any professional’s arsenal; we architects have all amassed folders upon folders on our servers filled with these fictional people. And although scale figures are one of those things that most of us take for granted in day-to-day practice, they are no doubt a disciplinary problem, a fact which became increasingly evident as we assembled the Encyclopedia. It might seem naively absurd, but as we stared at the countless figures in this book it became hard to see them as anything but a kind of global citizenry. They are Architecture’s refugees. They travel the world, popping up from time to time across various institutions and schools, at lectures, on reviews, and in student work. And the more we looked at them, the more we thought about both the architecture offices that created them and the wonderfully diverse world we all live in—a world which seems ever more intolerant of difference and increasingly inhuman.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Michael Abel, Jacob Comerci, Taylor Cornelson, Michaela Friedberg, Paul Ruppert, John Yurchyk
Graphic Design: Studio Lin

Related Projects:
Installation No. 14