Pavilion No. 1, Puppet Theater. Image courtesy Florian Holzherr and Michael Vahrenwald
MOS architects design a wide range of modular buildings around the world that they themselves consider to be experimental and “willfully strange," including their “Element House” and an inflatable structure they proposed for PS1 called “Prehistoric Future.” For the PS1 design, they created shaggy huts with chimneys that were covered with aluminum fabric on the inside to give the affect of a primitive escape from the art world surroundings.
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To celebrate their built works over the past 10 years and those still in progress, NY-based architects Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample published MOS: Selected Works, a fun collection of what they consider their most “innovative and off-kilter architectural designs.”The young architects don’t take themselves so seriously in terms of office culture and conceptualizing their projects and they’ve even a built a humorous manifesto to support it titled, "Office Policy." It starts,“You are asked to remember that one aim of the Office is to get it ‘exactly wrong.’ We believe in the counterintuitive as an important architectural divide.”Works highlights the evolution of the firm’s process and aesthetics across multiple mediums and scales. Published by Princeton Architecture Press, the monograph features 32 projects from a puppet theater at Harvard University to private modern homes. We asked the lead architects about what to expect in the book:
The Creators Project: Is there an aesthetic thread in the featured collected works?MOS: Deadpan, boring, straightforward, generic, non-composed, casual, etc…Do you apply the same thinking to a residence as you do to a community center? Are the core design values the same?No and yes. I think most people focus on the playful aspects of our work, but we’re responsible architects, we provide a service to our clients, we work with our budgets, we organize and manage things well, we know how to build, but at the same time we think all of our work relates to each other whether it’s an orphanage or house.
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House No. 5, Element House. Image courtesy of MOS
What are the virtues of being considered young architects?It’s hard to start an architecture office in America, very few clients are willing to take a chance. Institutions here are risk-averse and prefer to hire someone that has done the same thing over and over again. That said, we've been lucky that some private clients and institutions are drawn to young architects they know will work very hard to ensure a good project.How did you, as architects, decide on your typography for the book design? Does it reflect the book of the buildings?We hired a great graphic designer, Neil Donnelley. Some architects want to do everything themselves, but we prefer to collaborate other disciplines. We like the playful use and mis-use of "type," but that is really coming from Neil’s response to our work.A lot of your built projects are fun and have elements of whimsy much like your office rules, how do you keep this sentiment alive? We don't lounge around drinking soda, eating bowls of candy and playing video games. You just make it part of the job, it’s not us in particular, it's just who the office is. Also, it helps to play music in the studio.
School No. 1, Krabbesholm. Image courtesy Michael Vahrenwald
House No. 2, Floating House. Image courtesy Florian Holzherr
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