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.

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.

Articles

A New Children’s Book by MOS Architects Chronicles a Family’s Quest for the Perfect Home
In the whimsical hardcover “Houses for Sale,” a family visits the greatest homes in architectural history to find the right fit.
A Floating House on Lake Huron Stands Out By Blending In
On the edge of a tiny island accessible only by boat, this buoyant summer home lives the life aquatic.