MOS
Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith of NYC-based MOS Architects discuss the complex intertwining of work and life, playfulness and the publication of process, feedback between academic culture and the world of practice, and collaborative models.
Recorded on August 27, 2024.
Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith launched MOS in 2003. New York City-based since 2011, Hilary and Michael have described their practice as “focusing on architecture and design through design research and multivalent architectural objects.” They often speak about their interdisciplinary, experimental design process and subjects like radical inclusion, which is reflected in their work various scales, from industrial design projects and exhibitions to multi-family housing and institutional buildings. MOS received an Emerging Voices Award from The Architecture League of New York in 2008, the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in architecture in 2010, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum National Design Award in architecture in 2015, the United States Artists award in 2020, and the Rome Prize in 2022. In addition to their accolades, their work has been added to the permanent collections of many art institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and The Art Institute of Chicago.
Hilary and Michael are also educators and writers. Hillary serves as the IDC Foundation Professor of Housing Design and as the Core III coordinator at Columbia GSAPP. Michael is a professor and associate dean at Princeton School of Architecture. Their writing has been published in numerous journals and magazines, as well as in several books that have captured the work of the practice at different moments. Recent and ongoing projects include exhibition design for Fabric Object at Princeton, a collective affordable housing residence in Washington, DC, houses across New York State, La Petite Ecole in France, Laboratorio de Vivienda in Apan Mexico, and a rug series titled Twice Woven.
About I Would Prefer Not To
Conceived and produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab and presented with The Architectural League, I Would Prefer Not To1Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” The Piazza Tales (1856). tackles a usually unexamined subject: the refusal of an architectural commission. Why do architects make the decision to forfeit the possibility of work? At what point is a commission not worth it? When in one’s career is it necessary to make such a decision? Whether concealed out of politeness or deliberately shielded from public scrutiny, architects’ refusals usually go unrecorded by history, making them difficult to analyze or learn from. In this series of recorded interviews, I Would Prefer Not To aims to shed light on the complex matrix of agents, stakeholders, and circumstances implicated in every piece of architecture.
Transcript
Transcript forthcoming.