MOS

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

This transcript was created using speech-to-text AI software and was lightly edited for continuity. The text may not accurately capture all information or aspects of the conversation.

Ana Miljački  00:21
Hello and thank you for tuning in. I’m Ana Miljacki, Professor of Architecture at MIT and director of the Critical Broadcasting Lab. And on behalf of the Architectural League of New York and the Critical Broadcasting Lab, I welcome you to our architecture podcast series titled I would Prefer Not To. I Would Prefer Not To is an oral history project conducted through audio interviews on the topic of perhaps the most important kind of refusal in architects’ toolboxes, refusal of the architectural commission. By definition, refusals stay hidden from public scrutiny and thus also hidden from history. Withdrawals of this kind tend not to leave paper trails and are not easy to examine or learn from. And yet the lessons contained in architects’ deliberations about and decisions not to engage are politically relevant and urgent. Decisions to not engage a commission, or types of commissions, or commissions with certain characteristics inevitably forfeit potential profit placing other values above it, at least momentarily. My guests in this episode are Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith, hello, Hilary and Michael.

Hilary Sample  01:29
Hello.

Michael Meredith  01:30
Nice to be here.

Miljački  01:31
Hilary and Michael launched their office in 2003 somewhere along their commuting trajectory at the time between Boston and New Haven. Since 2011 MOS has been a New York based office that Hilary and Michael have described as focusing on architecture and design through design research and multivalent architectural objects. They have often talked about their interdisciplinary design process, about things like radical inclusion and experimentation that result in work on various scales, ranging from products through furniture and exhibitions to residential and multi family housing as well as institutional buildings. MOS received the Architecture League of New York’s Emerging Voices Award 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 most recently, the Rome Prize in 2022. In addition to their accolades, their work has been acquired to permanent collections of many art institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and The Art Institute of Chicago. Hilary and Michael are both educators and writers, with Hillary serving as IDC foundation Professor of Housing Design and Core III coordinator at Columbia GSAPP and Michael as 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 of theirs 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. Michael and Hilary, I know that you’re eager to talk about refusal shaping your practice more broadly, but let’s please start with the question that I begin every one of these episodes about, the most memorable decision to not engage or to drop a commission, or if that has not happened yet, can you imagine it happening and on what grounds?

Sample  03:50
Well, I was just gonna say, Ana, thank you for having us. We really enjoy your podcast and we listen to it, so it’s super nice for us to be part of your archive. I think we’re probably mostly just eager to talk more about the framing of a practice as a kind of act of refusal, or acts of refusal than a specific project.

Meredith  04:18
You think you should be prepared with a specific story to tell. But I think in some ways, the way that we understand the podcast, on some level, is to try to find when the values of an architect or firm are kind of misaligned with the values, let’s say, of capitalism and to understand, you know, just what architects values are. Let’s say, I would say, we began kind of misaligned with capitalism and began with a kind of rejection. So I mean, in some ways, we don’t have like a clear story, like a one big refusal. But I think just our type of practice and who we are is embedded with refusals, in a way. And I think in some ways, rejection and refusal is not necessarily… It’s sort of baked into a certain model of architecture, an academic model, perhaps an avant garde model. Well, let’s get a little bit at the way in which the shape of your studio informs the shape of the body of work that you have been producing, and vice versa.  Yeah.

Miljački  05:37
Or categories of refusal that you’d like to sort of put in relation to those two shapes.

Meredith  05:45
Well I think, for instance, and Hilary, you can expand on this, but we’ve always, unlike many of our peers and colleagues, in some ways we’ve always been really small. I mean, we’re a handful of people. We’ve always had our practice in our house, basically like, we live upstairs and the office is downstairs. We’ve always had that kind of intimacy with the work in a way like, we would never I mean, I would feel horrible if we said MOS is a brand or a style. It would feel just weird for us. It’s like, we live our work, and the work is embedded in our lives. It’s intertwined.

Sample  06:26
I mean, I would say also, I mean, we really started with the idea of being small, but also doing lots of different kinds of things, being inclusive to work and maybe refusing to sort of set paths that we saw others doing. I mean, I appreciate all those things. They just didn’t feel right for us. Maybe we would, maybe rather do lots of different things than one thing in particular. So that’s a framework, and that’s like, not efficient in any way. And so that makes practice challenging for that, if we had picked one thing or one way of working, and I worked for a long time before finishing grad school and starting to practice with Michael and so, in a way, MOS comes out of those experiences and refusing a lot of those experiences, in a way.

Miljački  07:40
To repeat them, yeah.

Sample  07:41
Yeah.

Miljački  07:43
Maybe I’m going to keep probing this question so from different angles, but I’m interested in the notion of body of work, which you’ve talked about at different points, but maybe body of work in relation to any kind of articulable criteria by which MOS engages projects, and conversely, criteria by which it does not engage projects, and also have these criteria changed with the transformation or maybe maturing of the office?

Meredith  08:12
It sort of assumes it’s kind of systematic, or we have, like a check list. It’s more of we feel, like, feel it out, and in some ways, because of who we are, I think it automatically, like people Google us or look at our website. And I think when they, it scares enough people off immediately, who are already not a good fit. So I think, it’s more of a feeling if we think they’re up for something. But in some cases, we are, we also are okay with projects where we really feel like we’re not sure if it’s going to be great architecture, let’s say expressive visually, kind of interesting architecture, but we really believe it’s good for the community that it’s in. In some ways, we do those projects in a very small scale and in modest projects that we are happy to do. In a way, it’s not, there’s less, they’re less, probably exciting, just for some, but for us, they’re important, really important. And I think that’s maybe one thing that’s changed as we’ve gotten older, is that we enjoy the service of architecture, like being engaged with others and trying to actually make things better.

Sample  09:46
I think so, also, at the same time we try to, I feel like we don’t take a project that we don’t think about, or we try anyway to think about, you know, it’s, you have signed an agreement. There’s a kind of clear set of things that are deliverables, or, the form is going to be a certain, there’s certain set expectation of things. But I feel like we try more, and this comes, I think, with practice and age, etc, that we still are searching for something else within the projects, and what else can we do? Because there’s so much that happens in a project that, as you said yourself, in this kind of project, gets left behind that people don’t see, don’t know about all this research, conversations, making of things, and so we’ve tried, and especially with the books, have been a way for us to show some of that work, let those ideas turn into other ideas, invite other people to the conversation with us, or even try to set up dialog and opportunities maybe for other people to contribute and talk about architecture. We don’t do that as a way for them to talk about our work, but to talk about a conversation, maybe, we’ve been part of that we don’t really want to let go, because as an architect, you have to mostly let go of the projects, owners, community, clients, they want to move in. They want to use the space. And so, you know, you’re, it’s a weird, awkward profession, in many ways.

Miljački  11:38
So would you say that there are no projects that come your way that raise a red flag that you have identified as a type of project or type of circumstance?

Meredith  11:50
I think we try to not, we haven’t done it, but like for instance, we don’t really do luxury housing. We have, for whatever reason, really focused more on affordability. And would we say No, we probably would. I mean, I don’t, I don’t…

Miljački  12:11
Yeah, but let’s talk about, what is the nature of focusing, like, how does focusing operate or take form in that sort of, in the practice?

Sample  12:25
Well, I think, I mean, we share a set of interests around the kinds of work we’d like to do. I think, we make work for other people, but it’s also work that we too would be in, like we don’t make anything we wouldn’t want to live in, to work in, to participate in, and maybe we’ve seen some of that in some of the housing work that raises concerns. But then we try to work to design things that are better and improve upon that and talk about that.

Meredith  13:08
Yeah, we don’t do like, what people call bread and butter work. If we don’t feel like there’s any chance for something good to come out of it, and that could mean many different types of good in a way, we just don’t really engage it. When, we get emails all the time for stuff and we don’t respond, or we say thank you…

Sample  13:33
Or there’s things we’ve tried, and it just, you know…

Meredith  13:37
It doesn’t work.

Sample  13:38
It doesn’t work. So it’s not really refusal. It’s just that ultimately, and if we had maybe compromised more, we would have built things and, you know… I don’t know.

Meredith  13:50
Hilary also likes it with the clients to say, we’ll do something small together and see if it works, before we jump into a big contract or something. Hilary’s always like, let’s do a little thing together and see how it goes. And then if it doesn’t work out, or we feel like we can’t work together, then it’s like, nobody’s, you know, nobody’s upset. Hopefully.

Miljački  13:51
I might get back to some of these things through a different, through a different angle. But you know, I always found your broadcasting really generous to students, to peers, to architecture, and that sharing of process and of experiments and of half baked ideas, as well as play with architecture, always made me think of as, or of that output, at least as a form of research. And maybe that word is too overdetermined, but I’m sort of interested in how you think about research, or I’m wondering if you think of all of that as research, or conversely, since you in some of your descriptions do use this term, how do you define research in your work?

Meredith  15:05
I would say, we can talk, like, Hilary mentioned the books, which is probably the most typical way you would think of research as a kind of written document. But the books really are, for us, they’re motivated in a very, very simple ways, like when we did the Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures, we really were thinking about who gets represented in architecture. I mean, in a way, it was a very simple thing. It was like, you know, look at what, who the people are, occupying architectural representations. And in a way, it’s a simple, simplistic thing, but it was revealing and exciting for us to break things down like that. Just basically take architecture drawings and then remove all the architecture and look at just the people. And I think we thought at the time it was also a political act in, really through architectural means. Similarly Vacant Spaces, where we really trying to just document with public data in Manhattan the vacancies and calling out who owns all these places, which are usually these scary financial instruments who owns all these spaces, how long they remain vacant? Like, try to just put all the data out there. I remember at the time we were, Hilary was worried we were, someone’s gonna come after us or something the, you know, just to make these things, which are, I don’t know if they’re research, but for us, they’re just like looking at architecture, looking at what we do in our environment in which we work. And I think we’ve always done that. We’re very self conscious, for lack of a better word about what we do, and we do try to be inclusive, always, like we are really interested in the community, especially when we did Petit Ecole, we bring in, we ask other architects to do, we did these assignments for children because it was partially used as a as a kind of camp, design camp for children. And so we asked architects that we admired to put together exercises for children. We do this when we do exhibitions, I think in a way as well, etc, trying to build community.

Sample  17:36
I think the Scale Figures project. There was also about, I think in general, I would say, some of the research, or what we think about is design research. It’s about ways of working, taking stock of where we are in a moment in time, and reflecting that through the work. So we’re always thinking about, you know, you finish projects and you move on. Some ideas come with you. Others stay behind. And when you look back, what do you see? And we talked a lot about using, especially architectural drawings as a way to reflect on that, because as architects, of course, we’re always projecting futures, but could we also maybe make some claims about the past and where we came from, and so that happened through maybe something like the Corridor House, but Scale Figures was also important in that way, because we were really talking at that time a lot about renderings. This was really the kind of moment when everybody’s producing renderings, or, I should say, maybe the expectation was that you produce a rendering. And so a lot of the work we do, it takes these things that happen in the moment and we’re being critical in the way of them and critiquing them, let’s say, and offering an alternative. I think we really believe that architects can offer alternatives and alternate things, and maybe unconventional, alternate things, but it’s also about showing the space of how we work or where we work, and so the archive is something we’re really interested in, and we work in, and we’ve done projects. We did a really, that was a wonderful experience, the project with the CCA but also as teachers and professors. I mean, I’m teaching at Columbia, Avery library, and to have access to these incredible archives that have great things and also are missing things. And so it’s a way to offer this information, material design work up and, you know, it isn’t finished. And even in maybe Maintenance Architecture, another book, they’re meant to be beginnings, than being complete.

Miljački  20:14
I think this is what I was, I was imagining you would talk about feedback, in a way, from this kind of broadcasting of the work and the process and the kind of snapshots of the practice and its concerns at different moments, because that’s what I’m reading in the kind of broadcasting. Obviously, I like that word, but I feel like there’s a lot of different media and material that you’ve been putting out. And I’m wondering if, in a way, every time you put something out, there is a feedback loop that comes back to the practice in some way that you can sort of recognize research being then, therefore embedded in the work.

Meredith  20:56
Yeah, I think, going back to the body of work kind of question that you started with it, it all feeds off of each other. The things that are interesting to me in the context that we are in, especially in this very strange academic world of architecture, which is weird, absurd at some basic level, it’s like, the writing, for instance, when you, some of our architecture is quite straightforward, I would say, with little twists or something or small changes. But then you write about it in a certain way, and you maybe change a little bit of something, and it kind of becomes something else, and all of that feeds off of each other. Like the books that we do, which we do, have been doing more and more of them. We’re doing less videos and things that we used to do at beginning. I think partially, I don’t know why, but it just sort of, you feel it out. We go through these phases, we did the videos, we did this, like we were trying to set up at one point we, our website was going to just be, everything was for sale. We did the reproductions, we were trying to do, like, turn our whole website into just selling everything, we were going to be, go full into capitalism. We could never really quite get to it. We did sell things for a little bit, but it was just a disaster. In the office, like we would, we made these scented candles, you know, and things, and we sold them, and then we would spend like, three days figuring out how to do an interesting package, uniquely for everything. It was like, just our ethos is, in general, is, we really want design to be for everyone. So we want it to be affordable. So we would try to make everything as cheap as you can. And then we lose so much money. And it was, it was just craziness, so we stopped doing that. But it was great while it lasted, that little thing, it’s like a little moment, and then we do something else. We started doing more books, different kinds of research. We were always interested in architecture as this field in which we can play and do many things, like, we can do furniture or rugs, and they can be as meaningful to us as a building.

Miljački  21:35
You in one interview, Michael, you said that you have known architecture for as long as you’ve known each other, and architecture seems many things for you, at least when we look at the body of work, but it also means definitely buildings. And there are certain sort of explanations of the body of work, or of the work that you’re producing that sometimes track on one or the other end of that possible spectrum of things you’re making. Is there a definition you like at the moment?

Meredith 24:42
Of architecture?

Miljački 24:42
Yeah.

Sample  24:42
In the US architecture is such a luxury, and we should have values around design and sharing and just also making it understandable. It doesn’t mean it’s not intellectual or smart. Everyone, I just to really struggle with the idea that we’re supposed to also be pretentious. I don’t know, that’s hard for me. I feel like we, one of the things we try also to make part of our practice to that end is to try to also do pro bono work, even though we’re really, you know, micro office, but that’s become just always thinking about ways that we can be accessible, and sometimes we can’t. I mean, it’s, you have to make payroll.

Miljački  25:36
Well, I was saving that question for later, but now that you’ve brought this up, which I was going to invoke, if you hadn’t, how do you make that work? So maybe we’re back to how do you organize a practice so that it can produce the work that you have been producing? What can you tell us about the mechanics of the practice?

Sample  25:57
Well, we work all the time.

Meredith  25:59
Yeah. We work a lot. And that’s partially why we have it in our house, probably always or…

Sample  26:06
Well, we do have division. There’s an office door, but just being incredibly organized, and I think also try to figure out ways that we know if a project is a kind of discrete thing where we see paths to do other work, and, you know, just try to figure out how to do that, assign things, and in a way, if we’re drawing, thinking about what kinds of drawings, what kinds of things can we make? Been working a lot on paper models, that they’re literally, the drawings get printed and cut and folded, and then we’re photographing them. And we have, in some ways, minimal expenses. I mean, this is very nuts and bolts, but…

Miljački  26:52
Yes yes that’s what we want, sort of, what project, how do you organize projects that can support a pro bono project? Or to be able to do the work that is, in a way, self-propelled, in some way, as a creative pursuit, right?

Meredith  27:11
Yeah. We have to have some projects that that pay for other projects, basically, I mean, it’s how it always has been for us. So we have some projects that make money or are billable in a way, and then we have a lot of projects that aren’t. So I think, though, for us, we don’t really talk about that in the office. Honestly, maybe we should more, but we just treat them all as ongoing, equal things, I think, for the most part, together. So they, we don’t…

Sample  27:47
Well, I probably talk about it more than you maybe. Not to try to, I don’t like the idea that this is stereotypical, Oh, she’s the finance person. He’s the tech guy, you know. But at some point you do have to make decisions. Yeah, could we refuse the business altogether? You can’t, I wish we could, but, but that’s also opportunities to be creative. I believe in that, and try to think about that as part of the design project, because it’s what enables design work and experiments and things.

Meredith  28:29
But we do projects like, like in Paraguay, Ascension, the Chacarita housing, which is under construction right now, which is a really important project for us. It’s, it’s for sure, financially, it’s not like a New York City project. And even when we do that, we were, there was a project that came to us, and then we brought in Adamo Faiden and eventually Equipo de Arquitectura. And when we deal with Adamo, we don’t work, we try to always structure, we don’t, we hate the idea of the design architect and the executive architect as a thing. It’s like this strange class structure in architecture that has been there. And it’s like, the design architect is the voice of the client in a way, or the owner. And then the architect of record is just the grunt, figuring it all out, technician. And we do everything to avoid that. We try to split everything equally financially, we break it down, 50:50, when we ever we do a collaborative project, we try to treat it really as fairly as we can. And we know it’s not like, it’s not necessarily even that fair, because we also have done projects with Tatiana, and like, you know that, if you’re an office in Buenos Aires, their cost, what did, Sebastian say? He said it’s like the cost of one employee in New York is six employees there. Which is a crazy I mean, how can we compete? So, but we do it.

Sample  30:23
Well, I think, I mean, getting back to the pro bono, I would say that the, it’s how the, understanding more about what’s getting built, and understanding the budgets better and things like, particularly if they’re installation kind of work. On that side you know what might be available to deconstruct a project. And if you know how to do that work, then you can say, well, actually, won’t cost you that much. Or because we’re making everything out of aluminum, you can sell it at the end. It’s easy to take it apart. So in a way, we work, that we understand the kind of economics, the future of it, the way you make it and so we’re making decisions about taking on projects because we know somewhat what we’re going to do.

Meredith  31:22
I would say that’s also the other, like, the refusals that we’ve made at the beginning. One of the refusals for us is this idea of architecture as this kind of class, luxury, expensive thing. We really try, and it’s not easy, and we may not even make it work, if you look at architecture from the 90s or the digital, the promise of the digital complexity project, which is what we come out of, at some level, it is an architecture that cannot, that nobody could afford, and it’s a very elite small group, and maybe it’s important as a kind of cultural expression of an avant garde ish kind of point of view. For us, we tried to turn, swerve away from that and still dealing with kind of, let’s say traditions of the avant gardes through, Let’s say non or anti expressionist kind of vehicles. But that architecture is deeply embedded in economics, actually, in some ways, and that we should be not afraid to talk about that a little bit, and to know how to build and knowing the cost of things is important for us. I got, we got so, I got so much at Princeton, people were so upset about our pitched roofs for a while. I got so much crap about it, from from colleagues, who are, you know, friends, they were like, it’s postmodernist quotes or something, and it’s not, it’s just like, yes, if you’re going to build in a certain cost per square foot and you’re dealing with a certain structure, you need to figure out how to work with this.

Miljački  33:09
So the question that I’m really interested in is how the kind of aesthetic project or pursuits that are specific in aesthetic terms or any other terms are discussed in the office.

Meredith  33:26
Yeah, we share images and things, like, we are, I think we’re always sharing. I don’t know what happens to the all the ephemeral of an office, like the group chats and everything like that. We do a lot that’s in a kind of mediated forums in the office where we’re sharing things, looking at things, talking back and forth, sending sketches or comments or and for sure, aesthetics is probably front and center. And a lot of those conversations. Also construction.

Sample  34:02
We’re making things all the time. I mean, so, you know this friend, just for example, these kind of paper models that are printed and they’re not usually glued even so they’re easy to be malleable and changed, and it’s constant about how it’s made, but why we’re making it, and we’re always thinking about where everything fits in a way with what we’ve made before, and thinking about what the kinds of things we’d like to do. I think we also talk a lot about what we’d like to do and where we’d like to go and the kinds of things we’d like to work on.

Meredith  34:12
Yeah, we’ve been really lucky in some ways, like I remember years ago now, it must be many years, maybe almost eight to ten years ago, I did a lecture at Princeton, and I remember at the end, Sylvia Lavin saying, what kind of work would you want to do? If you could do anything?

Miljački  35:05
I’ll ask you that too.

Meredith  35:07
And I said at the time, social housing. And she laughed, and everybody laughed, and thought I was being like, ironic. I mean, this is a problem I get a lot. Everyone thinks I’m ironic and I thought, well, actually, that’s really what, I’m being serious. That’s really what we would like to do and we’ve been lucky in some strange way that that has happened in small ways, and I don’t know how.

Sample  35:38
Yeah, but I think we’ve been lucky to be included in things and events and, yeah.

Miljački  36:15
How does work tend to come your way? And I’m hoping that we can discuss, really, the mechanics of your collaboration with clients, or, sort of, how do you grow a line of work in the office? Or maybe you’re of collaboration as co-creation more generally. And I do think that here the kind of the Paraguay Project is an interesting, maybe, question, or the ones that you’ve done in Mexico on the collaboration part, but who sends those emails or whatever way sort of work comes, right? How does it come?

Meredith  36:47
I will pick a totally different project to start with. And Hilary, you, I think it was the apartment, but we did a little apartment in New York during covid, and it was a pleasure. The client is amazing. He, I think he emailed us, or did he call? I don’t remember how he originally reached out to us, and we still don’t know how he found us. Honestly, we are always asking people, how did you find us? Because we’re curious, and he just said he likes design or something, and he’s a doctor who works with the homeless, and he is, part of the pleasure of that project is just conversations with him as a client, and his involvement and we did a lot of furniture. I mean, it was very much like a total design thing at some level, like we were really involved in designing furniture together with him and elements of the project, lighting, etc, like, just tons of stuff. And it was, it was great. I don’t know how, I don’t, we would love to do more projects where we can, we could, that could be like that. I mean, that was a great experience. Paraguay is a different animal, because it was really with the government. The Ministry of Housing…

Sample  38:08
Well, it was an invited competition.

Meredith  38:10
Yeah, we were one of four, and then we got it, and it was based just really on our CVs. It wasn’t a project, a competition of design. It was, I don’t know it was just our…

Sample  38:25
It was a long time ago, actually, and then covid happened. And so we just thought, well, that there goes, that will never happen. And then it came back.

Meredith  38:34
It was some strange email. We were on this long list of emails that seemed like one of these fake emails that you would get, that we get sometimes, and it was like, we were on it with, like, Lacaton Vassal, and a ton of people were on this, and they just put a bunch of architects on this list and sent it to everybody, and we responded. And then eventually it turned into something real. And that process, though, was working, really, with the government. I mean, it’s real, serious social housing. And all the people that, it’s in an area where the people who are, basically have lived there, squatted, there for generations, and they live in, really, I would say, meager ways, like just like a piece of corrugated metal over a wall without running water, and with livestock in there with them, and it’s like multiple generations. And, in a good way, everybody who was there gets, they did a lot of community work, even though, and also Equipo who’s from there, who works with us, did community work. We did spreadsheets of every, I mean, it was like crazy amount of data collection, like, who can go upstairs, who can’t go upstairs? Who needs to be next to who? Because there’s extended families that need to be next to each other, who, you know, etc. And we had to then design for these very unique and strange sites. This is a very leftover site. The thing is amazing. It’s like a 10 minute walk from the governmental center. So the President of the, it’s in the news where the President of the country is like, championing this project, etc. It’s very odd for us and even the, I would say, the Ministry of Housing has an idea of what social housing looks like. They really wanted us to do, like Unite blocks, honestly, because it’s construction is easy. It’s easily repeatable. They had biases towards certain things, and we really had to push and fight for something that’s much more site specific to these kind of strange I mean, the sites are really crazy, leftover sites

Sample  40:54
Yeah, and more intimate to a family and households that are complex, actually in the interior, and domestic life is not, you know. I mean, this is, everywhere. Domestic life is different everywhere. So how can you make housing that helps people and so basically, every family and household was interviewed, what they would like in their housing.

Meredith  41:24
And everybody got an outdoor space to have food production with mango trees or places for animals. Everybody gets cross-ventilation and passive lighting. We had to really show, one thing that I would say that was great from the government’s point of view, is that they were all in on sustainability and these are low energy housing in general, because an electricity bill is not necessarily going to help some of these families. Yeah.

Sample  41:55
And I think to go back to your question a little bit, we couldn’t have had this project if we hadn’t done the work in Mexico that we were doing. And we learned, we did many studies. Also we were invited to do other studies for households and kind of repeated housing in a way. And from there we learned so much about culture, and in this case, especially the kitchen in Mexico and cooking. And coming from New York, we’re used to things being very small, right? And so they kept saying to us, it’s not New York. You need a bigger kitchen, you know, which we were sort of like, oh, wait, I don’t, but that’s going to be expensive, or we were unsure of those things. So, and there we’re also working with, especially with the Laboratorio and Apan, that was a wonderful experience and opportunity for us to learn as architects and engage with a greater community, I mean, kind of international group of architects and work locally in Mexico and and we’ve been doing a lot of work with Tatiana Bilbao and her office and others. Also too, Fernanda Canales. I mean, she’s a kind of great architect, but also historian of housing. And so it’s also about finding and working with people who are building and designing, but I think also really in tune and value understanding history and being critical of that, but also making writing part of their practices. So we’ve kind of grown up in this sort of desires to do certain kinds of work, but it’s also about the ways of working too, that I think that’s been one of the biggest changes for us and reflection. And, you know, and I worked at OMA for two years with a great cohort of colleagues, many of whom I’m still in touch with, and were really instrumental in shaping some of the ways I think. And after that, it was a kind of a long period of not having that kind of larger scale experience of working with many people like this, and so now we’re sort of doing this almost on every project. We’re collaborating in some way, and in terms of buildings.

Meredith  44:29
I think also, the collaboration we really think is like the model in general for architecture. I think maybe because there’s two of us as a base, that it is inevitable, that collaboration is kind of natural, but it’s, it really should be the model for everybody, and it really is. It already is the model. Honestly, it’s just not acknowledged.

Sample  44:54
I like, Michael, you always say we’re never less than two voices. I think that’s a very nice way to describe the intent or ideas of the work.

Miljački  45:04
Maybe I’m interested now, having heard you describe this sort of what happens, or how do we think of the intersection between specific pursuits that might be yours, the two of yours, or the offices, types of commissions and collaboration, there’s something between those, the intersection of all those three kind of topics or themes that is interesting to me. How do you map one onto the other? In a way.

Meredith  45:38
I would say, sometimes you have to work within systems that aren’t perfect, and find a way, like, for instance, you might not get paid what you, all your hours that you put into something, but, if you look at that metric, and you try to break everything down for an architectural project, it may be the logical and rational thing to just not do it. But, in the end, we try, in very small ways, to make things better. I mean, that is we really, we do. It sounds corny, perhaps, but, it is true. So I think the refusal can sometimes be it’s more interesting. Like, what’s the limit? To me is, like, how much can you accept? Because, it’s not, it’s never going to be, at least not for us, I mean, I think for like a superstar architect, the models that are, that were kind of generations before us, I don’t think anyone in our generation is at the superstar model, yet, maybe. They’re much, they have a lot more resources at their commands to do things, and they can say no a lot easier and things like this, for things. For us, we have to try to figure out what are, what can we accept?

Sample  47:08
Well, I think maybe to that, something I’ve been thinking a little bit about has to do with the experiences of clients and institutions. As Michael started saying, have more resources. Board members will have built work. They already know what it means to work with an architect. There’s a whole set of already understanding and, you know, abilities that come with some of those projects where, when you work in a rural setting with someone who’s never built before, I think it’s, I don’t know, I can’t say it’s clear, but there’s a whole other set of challenges that have to, that you have to do and maybe those take longer in some ways, because the conversations have to be different in order to, how do you really begin to cultivate design? And maybe design is just only the doorknob. I don’t know. The scale and, sort of thinking. And I have had thoughts lately of like, it would be great just to only work with people who have built before, because then you don’t have this whole other set of challenges and issues, and that, that’s where, for me, that’s this huge struggle, because then architecture is not accessible, and it returns to this elitist, privileged space of if you’ve built something before, you know, that’s a luxury, right? So.

Miljački  48:16
I have lots of questions still. So let me speed up a bit, but we’ve jumped around my sort of plan a little bit with different things. So in an introduction to one of your books in 2013, Stan Allen proposed that your work has made a case for a loosening of architecture’s catalog of tools and techniques. And I certainly would say it has been or it has expanded that tool set or kit. And I’d say the journey itself has been celebrated throughout the work that you have done in various books, and maybe prompted by this notion, but also the conversation on models, which we started kind of invoking a little bit with Lutjens Padmanabhan in Log 50, I wanted to ask you, how you know when a specific line of creative pursuit is finished, or is work ever finished?

Meredith  48:47
Work is never finished. I think we still, work is never finished. We are, for us. It is still, the early work is still in our heads and we’re still looking at it, and we still think of missed, I mean, I know I do, I’m neurotic, like, I think of all the mistakes and things I wish we did better or differently, constantly, on every project, and so they haunt me. I think that’s true for Hilary. I don’t want to speak for her, but it’s, it’s definitely true for me.

Sample  50:16
Yeah, I mean, I’m interested in things that build upon each other, or that are in the past, and we rethink them for something in the future. I like to think some things are, I mean, they’re fixed, and it’s a thing, Petit Ecole, I mean, that’s, or we did a greenhouse recently. I mean, those are discrete things. Otherwise, in some ways, yeah, how does, how do you make architecture accessible? If you say it’s never finished, it’s, I mean, I agree also, Michael, with what you’re saying. But at the same time, I want to feel like this thing is a thing. It can be, can go away.

Meredith  51:01
You’re more, you’re a better parent, maybe, than I am with these things. I think you let them out into the world. I think, I, for instance, Petit Ecole, like the detailing of certain things, or it maybe small things, I think we could have done it a little bit differently, like that one joint connection. Anyways, I can just…

Sample  51:20
Yeah for sure, but it’s the same in drawing or making a book, or if we’d only had done this thing, like that and that thing, and, you know, anyway.

Meredith  51:28
Yeah, yeah, we’re constantly doing, I did like, Stan has said that to us multiple times, because we, where he said that we’re really good at the casual and I’ve always thought that was a really nice compliment, and it’s not at all, I think that’s also, and the playful thing. The reality is, like, it’s not…

Sample  51:54
It’s not that casual.

Meredith  51:55
I mean, there is a tonal quality to the work, let’s say, hopefully, but there is a lot of work behind that. Even I would say…

Sample  52:07
It’s serious, it’s, it’s, yeah, yeah.

Meredith  52:10
The way of writing for me has been the biggest change over our, more than anything, the way that things are written, the narratives of things, those have changed the most and have… There’s so much work in those actually, that is really, I don’t know if anybody ever reads or sees. I’m always surprised when people read anything. Honestly, I don’t really think…

Miljački  52:36
Let me just prove to you that I have. So, I remember feeling completely aligned with you when you started talking about everything all at once, or about a kind of radical inclusion as a kind of a generational position that could account for the social and political responsibilities we felt, include aesthetic and disciplinary projects, as well as more fine grain obsessions or details. And then you moved on to topics or terms of indifference and blankness that perhaps offer aesthetic and political projects of inclusion as well. And I’m wondering if you agree with this characterization of a kind of maybe trajectory in how you describe the work, would you still use any of these words or ways of talking about what you’re doing? And then finally, really, how should we think about the aesthetic project, or projects that preoccupy you in relation to commissions that you pursue or don’t pursue?

Meredith  53:38
I think the aesthetic project of indifference was, I think, that was meant to be a compliment to a certain generation of architects. I mean, I don’t think comparing people to Rauschenberg and Johns and Ed Ruscha etc. is, I thought it was a positive, but somehow it can also get taken as, it could be taken, because it seems like a pejorative kind of word. But I always thought indifference was just tied into like modernism with Camus etc., kind of some version of a modernism.

Miljački  54:23
For me, it’s more, sort of, how do we think of, well, how do you describe what you’re after, and how do we relate what you’re after to how you, what commissions you pursue and which you don’t?

Meredith  54:41
Well, I will, one small story.

Miljački  54:43
How do you relate those?

Meredith  54:44
Yeah, one thing, someone told me recently, I think it was Joseph Bedford said something, that radical inclusion came out the same time as absolute architecture, and it’s the same year.

Miljački  54:55
I can see that.

Meredith  54:57
And he thought that was super interesting as a kind of counterpoint to each other, and which is, I didn’t even put that together. I didn’t even think about that. I think in terms of how our work is an illustration of a set of beliefs or values or ideas. I just think it is. I mean, I don’t know how to explain it. It just is.

Miljački  55:28
This is like a didactic question, for those who are trying to start their own practices or think about their own practice.

Meredith  55:35
You just start. I mean, I think you really do have to be, you just have to start. I think if you try to game the system, whatever that means, or you try to, yeah, you try to do what you think you’re supposed to do to get something, I just don’t think… I just never believed in that. I honestly, you just have to do what you I mean, and it’s pretty corny, but you just do what you what feels right.

Sample  56:05
Well, I think there’s also something about, I mean, there’s a modesty to the work and an efficiency in some ways, or, well, economics is better than efficiency, maybe in a kind of general sense of things like, not generic, but more general that we’re both, have been interested in. I mean, we definitely share certain kinds of aesthetics. And we trade in ideas and through images. And maybe we did more of that before, yeah, but from the beginning, and so then to find ways of starting projects… Now, obviously, after things have been built, and there’s a set of things, those are our references we look at. And you can say, oh, it’s like this, or it comes out of that, or what about that thing?

Meredith  57:12
For sure, we’re interested in a history of, let’s say, I would say anti, like certain refusals, anti-expressionist kind of work, both architecturally and in terms of art or music or I mean, the problem with it, and I’ve said this before, is that eventually those things, those refusals, aesthetic refusals, they become their own thing. They can’t. They only have a limited shelf life. I thought that if you look at, in terms of, let’s say, music, one of the things I think that we were interested in, and this is something I think Lucia did a symposium on this at one point, on instruments and stuff like this, like we have tried… Harry Partch, you know, invented all these instruments, and was really against John Cage. He thought John Cage was just selling nihilism and death, and everybody was buying it. And he was, thought that the way forward for music was the need to invent new instruments. And I think we are interested in that. And in some ways, the projects that we do, in the small experiments, are trying to look for new instruments for architecture and architectural meaning.

Miljački  58:50
This is where I think the kind of housing question is interesting, the one that in our conversation today, you brought it up Michael as something you said you wanted to do. And Hillary has said somewhere else that basically this was one of those things that you had to teach yourselves how to do. And obviously you’re involved in housing at Columbia, but housing seems to provide the kind of constraints on these two angles, economy of means and meaning.

Sample  59:21
I, you know, my undergrad thesis project was about women’s housing, working women’s housing in New York after the Barbizon closed. So in some ways I haven’t gone very far. I’ve read all of the faculty who I teach with now. I was reading all their texts at that time, 30 years ago! Anyways.

Miljački  59:42
A short one, did you ever regret not taking a commission or vice versa?

Sample  59:48
I would say maybe, there were opportunities for things, but we also wanted to have a family, and I probably was more, saying, No, we need to not do that in order to have a family, start a family.

Meredith  1:00:08
That’s true.

Sample  1:00:09
I don’t regret that. I mean, I don’t regret not doing those things. But you know.

Miljački  1:00:14
You have spoken about your office and your process often, and I still assign Michael’s text Notes to Those Starting in Architecture to the incoming students, in fact, they’re reading it right now. And I was just rereading your office policy, which was published in 2016…

Meredith  1:00:33
Oh it was written way before that, by the way. Yeah, it’s weird!

Miljački  1:00:36
But it’s an interesting text, right? And so given those texts, I’m wondering if you have any procedures in place by which you both expose your office to the realities of running the office and invite, do you invite your team to think collectively about the commissions that you will and will not take?

Sample  1:00:59
Yeah, I think so. I mean, we talk about…

Meredith  1:01:02
Sometimes we worry. We talk too much about it, because not everybody wants to hear about all the…

Sample  1:01:07
Stress!

Meredith  1:01:08
Yeah, the stress of it all.

Sample  1:01:10
…Of running an office, and, you know, the… because it is a lot of work to convince clients about design sometimes. And we’re, mostly everyone is copied on emails, so they’re seeing, they’re seeing the clients interface with them. They get experience with this and…

Meredith  1:01:38
Directly working with clients sometimes.

Sample  1:01:41
So it’s, it’s a roller coaster. You know, I think, I worked in a really small office before we had our practice. It was my least favorite experience of all the firms. So I’m often thinking like, oh, here I am, what can I do differently? Because it was, it was a lot that was shared and, but at the same time, if I hadn’t had that, I wouldn’t know. So that’s a, it’s always a question.

Meredith  1:02:12
I think also, our office is really tied to schools, so a lot of times the people working with us, or former students or, the world of the academy, the world of the office. It’s all mixed together in a way. And…

Miljački  1:02:37
Radically intertwined.

Meredith  1:02:39
It’s intertwined for sure.

Sample  1:02:40
There’s that expectation too, and maybe that’s challenging sometimes, because you have a different hat on some days, and we’re teaching in the office, what we’re making in MOS, we’re teaching people how to do, we don’t always, we’re not doing that at school. Or it’s different. It’s a different thing. I mean, I teach a core course, so I’m not teaching MOS, usually, in that respect, or not fully.

Meredith  1:03:11
There’s nothing worse than seeing like a bad, or even a good copy of what you think you do! Sometimes it’s like, the most upsetting thing as like a, usually, that’s one of the ways you can track our changes in the office…

Miljački  1:03:25
In response?

Meredith  1:03:26
Yeah, like, we’ll be doing this thing, and then all of a sudden we see versions of it, and then we’re like, Oh, we got to move on to something else!

Miljački  1:03:31
But this is my earlier question about feedback loops, which I do think, if we look at the, your broadcasting output and material architectural output, representation, it has transformed over the years in dialogue with culture, architecture, culture, school culture, peer culture, right? In some way that I find really fascinating to track or think about. Can we talk a little bit about the conditions in which you do your best work, or would prefer to do your work? I mean, this is where I’m asking you about, are all commissions equally exciting? Are there ideal commissions or circumstances for a commission?

Sample  1:04:28
Yes and no.

Meredith  1:04:32
I mean, we like to do a range of things, so if we did only big buildings, whatever that means, I think it would be very weird. Actually, I don’t know how we would do that, but for us to be able to do, let’s say, small scale things with large scale, with writing or software or videos, I think for us it’s important that they’re always this sort of cosmos of things in the office floating around.

Sample  1:05:05
I mean, the projects are, it’s always a roller coaster. So I think it’s about expectations of things and trying to set that up for yourself. So when you know something is a challenging moment in a project, how do you keep going with that? And so that’s where always thinking about the kind of bigger questions around a project, I think can can keep you going? I mean, this has maybe more to do with construction or filing permits with the city. You know, these things are very, they’re very challenging, and they take time. And so you could feel like you’ve lost the relationship to design in those moments. But I think that’s where I was always asking greater questions. But I think to work with people who are interested and knowledgeable about whatever the project is. That’s the best,

Miljački  1:06:10
That’s the ideal?

Sample  1:06:11
Yeah, when they’re really for it and I think, also the this, between Michael and I, we are excited at different moments in projects and keep each other going. Or in the office, someone is…

Meredith  1:06:26
That’s true.

Sample  1:06:26
…excited, like, if I’m not so sure maybe about something, but I see that somebody’s enjoying this thing, or they have questions, and they’re working on it, then I, it helps me sort of recenter, and say, Okay, maybe I’m stressing too much because I’ve been through it on other projects.

Meredith  1:06:46
Usually we say is, because there’s two of us, if usually one person is sort of down on something, the other person says it’s going to be great, you know, don’t worry. It’s nothing. It’s really nothing, don’t…

Sample  1:06:58
We’re still naive.

Meredith  1:07:01
And then there’s a moment when we both say, this is not good. Then we know it’s a real problem. You know what I mean? Usually we’re…

Miljački  1:07:10
Cycling in different…

Meredith  1:07:11
Yeah, cycling in different ways. And then we land in the same place where we both are like, Yeah, this is really not good. Yeah, it’s not good. Then something has to happen.

Miljački  1:07:20
So, Hilary and Michael, thank you for talking to me today and listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of I Would Prefer Not To.

Meredith  1:07:30
Thank you.

Sample  1:07:31
Thank you.