MOS, Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, ... For better or worse, this website is not an encyclopedia of all our work. It is an informal bulletin board, an ever-growing wall to pin up images and text, 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. When we began, 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 design office that works closely on each project through playful experimentation, serious research, and old-fashioned problem-solving. We engage architecture as an open system of interrelated issues ranging from architectural typology, digital methodologies, building performance, sustainability, structure, fabrication, materiality, tactility, and use, as well as larger networks of the social, cultural, and environmental. Our inclusive process allows MOS to operate at a multiplicity of scales.
Selected Awards and Citations
2010 Academy Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters
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
2010 Academy Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters
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 Floating House is the intersection of a vernacular house typology with the shifting site-specific conditions of this unique place: an island on Lake Huron. The location on the Great Lakes imposed complexities to the house's fabrication and construction, as well as its relationship to site. Annual cyclical change related to the change of seasons, compounded with escalating global environmental trends , cause Lake Huron's water levels to vary drastically from month-to-month, year-to-year. To adapt to this constant, dynamic change, the house floats atop a structure of steel pontoons, allowing it to fluctuate along with the lake.
Locating the house on a remote island posed another set of constraints. Using traditional construction processes would have been prohibitively expensive; the majority of costs would have been applied toward transporting building materials to the remote island. Instead, we worked with the contractor to devise a prefabrication and construction process that maximized the use of the unique character of the site: Lake Huron as a waterway. Construction materials were instead delivered to the contractor's fabrication shop, located on the lake shore. The steel platform structure with incorporated pontoons was built first and towed to the lake outside the workshop. On the frozen lake, near the shore, the fabricators constructed the house. The structure was then towed to the site and anchored. In total, between the various construction stages, the house traveled a total distance of approximately 80 km on the lake.
The formal envelope of the house experiments with the cedar siding of the vernacular home. This familiar form not only encloses the interior living space, but also enclosed exterior space as well as open voids for direct engagement with the lake. A "rainscreen" envelope of cedar strips condense to shelter interior space and expand to either filter light entering interior spaces or screen and enclose exterior spaces giving a modulated yet singular character to the house, while performing pragmatically in reducing wind load and heat gain.
Photos by Florian Holzherr
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