MODU
MODU | Outdoor Room, Beijing, China, 2013. Credit: Matthew Niederhauser
The Architectural League’s annual Emerging Voices program spotlights North American architects, landscape architects, and urban designers who have significant bodies of realized work and the potential to influence their field.
MODU won a 2019 award.
Phu Hoang and Rachely Rotem launched Brooklyn firm MODU in 2012, after several years of collaborating as solo practitioners.
Much of the firm’s work addresses climate change through a design approach Hoang and Rotem call “indoor urbanism.” In their firm philosophy statement, they write: “Architecture is not simply the middle scale of the built environment, but the space where the urban and interior scales intersect. Merging these two opposing scales prompts the borders around architecture to recede, which can change everyday attitudes about the environment.”
Projects include:
Hoang earned a BS from the Georgia Institute of Technology and an MArch from Columbia University’s GSAPP. He is currently an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia; previously, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania.
Rotem holds a BArch from Technion in Israel and an MArch from Columbia University’s GSAPP. She currently teaches at MIT and has also lectured at RISD, Pratt, and the University of Pennsylvania.
The partners were awarded a 2016 Rome Prize in Architecture. In 2017, they were named fellows of the US–Japan Creative Artists Program by the National Endowment of the Arts. Their work has also been recognized by the American Institute of Architects, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
More information
- Scaling across disciplines: an interview with Founders Rome Prize winners MODU, Archinect
- MODU Architecture, Domus
- Cloud Seeding Pavilion by MODU features canopy made of 30,000 plastic balls, Dezeen