The first thing to know about MOS is that we are a collective of designers, architects, thinkers, and state-of-the-art weirdoes. The two principals, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample, teach at Harvard University and Yale University while maintaining the practice. We work all over the world, designing private houses, institutional buildings, urban strategies, research, books, installations, and other projects that are less easily categorized. For better or worse, all of our work isn't shown on this website. (It's nearly impossible to continually document ourselves while producing new work anyway). The website is more of 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 just 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. At first 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.
Today, as we've grown, we continue to operate around one large table as a small experimental office that works closely on each project through playful experimentation, serious research, and old-fashioned problem-solving. Through our work we engage architecture as an open system of interrelated issues ranging from architectural typology, digital methodologies, sustainability, structure, fabrication, materiality, tactility, and use, as well as larger networks of the social, cultural, and environmental. This process of participation and inclusion - radical inclusion - allows MOS to operate, producing and inflecting environments at a multiplicity of scales.
