mos

MOS, Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, ...
The first thing to know about MOS is that we are a collective of architects, thinkers, and state-of-the-art designers. The two principals, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample, teach at Harvard University and Yale University. We work with a variety of clients all over the world, designing private houses, institutional buildings, urban strategies, research, books, installations, furniture, and other projects that are less easily categorized. For better or worse, the website is not an encyclopedia of all our work. The website is more of a bulletin board, a way to make the design process more intimate and social, allowing others to engage our work and give us feedback, while providing ourselves with another venue outside of the office to illustrate and reflect upon what we're doing. We really don't know exactly when MOS started, but it was sometime in 2003. At first 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. So eventually we drifted towards MOS - an acronym of our names and a shared desire to be horizontal and fuzzy, as opposed to tall and shiny. We began our makeshift office around a large table and began working through a range of design experiments - a make-believe of architectural fantasies, problems, and thoughts about what we would be building if we could only get the work. "MOS definitely" was our slogan. Today, as we've grown, we continue to operate around one large table as a small experimental office that works closely on each project through playful experimentation, serious research, and old-fashioned problem-solving. Through our work we engage architecture as an open system of interrelated issues ranging from architectural typology, digital methodologies, sustainability, structure, fabrication, materiality, tactility, and use, as well as larger networks of the social, cultural, and environmental. This open and inclusive process allows MOS to operate, producing and inflecting environments at a multiplicity of scales.

Selected Awards and Citations

2009 Young Architects Award PS1/MoMA Summer Pavilion Winners

2009 Progressive Architecture Award, Drive-In and Park, Marfa Texas

2008 Architectural Record: Design Vanguard

2008 Surface Magazine, The Avant-Guard Awards: The Scholars

2008 First Prize “Flip a Strip” Competition, Scottsdale Museum of Art, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA

2008 Emerging Voices Series,The Architectural League of New York, New York

2008 Finalist, Iakov Chernikhov International Prize

2007 I.D. magazine, Design Distinction, IVY, 53rd Annual Design Review,

2005 First Prize, Architecture/Design, "AICA," Association Internationale des Critiques d'art <

2005 I.D. Award Best in Category, Puppet Theater, 51rd Annual Design Review

Selected Exhibitions

2009 Without Out, Tobias Putrih & MOS, List Centre for Contemporary Art , M.I.T.

2009 Intervention#10, Tobias Putrih & MOS, Boijmans Museum, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

2009 Overhang, Tobias Putrih & MOS, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art , NewCastle, England

2008 Artist Space, Matters of Sensation New York, NY, USA

2008 CStem 2008 – Breeding Objects Torino, Italy

2008 Flexibility-Design in a Fast Changing Society Torino World Design Capital, Torino, Italy

2008 Venice Biennale Experimental Architecture Padiglione Italia Pavilion

2008 ‘Flip-a-Strip’ Scottsdale Museum of Art, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA

2008 Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY USA

2007 International Conference Urban Health Johns Hopkins/University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD

2007 Scripted by Purpose, FUEL Collection 249 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA, USA

2007 Work by MOS , Cite de l’architecture et du partimoine, Paris, France

2007 Design Triennale - iVY, Design Life Now, ICA, Boston, MA, USA

2007 Young Architects Program, PS1/MoMa, New York, NY, USA

2006 Beyond the Harvard Box, Harvard Graduate School of Design

2007 Cooper Hewitt Design Triennale Design Life Now, New York

2007 Living Spaces, ICFF, New York

2005 SoftCell, Henry Urbach Architecture, New York

2004 Young Architects Program PS1/MoMa, New York, NY, USA

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The Hill House’s site, in the Finger Lake region of upstate NY, slopes dramatically towards the water.Due to the slope and budget constraints we reworked the single story vernacular typology into a two story house by integrating the house into the slope, utilizing the basement as living space and incorporate the view into the design. The basement level was turned into living space through the introduction of a void at the center of the plan, subverting the typical basement condition of the adjacent houses. Similarly we inverted the vernacular typology to radically open up the interior to the outside. The shape of the roof became a distorted vernacular gable roof that reflects and responds to the shape of the site, running parallel and marking plateaus and shifts in the landscape. The interior space is a hollowed out bubble with the same shape as the roof. To provide passive cooling in the summer, the void of exterior space that penetrates the center of the plan allows for passive ventilation and induction, while the white roof is common amongst the agricultural buildings nearby because it performs well in that climate and is efficient in reducing heat gain during the summer time. In the lower level, the ground at the void becomes a fragment of ground/landscape- a small moss garden. Photos by Florian Holzherr