Exhibition Design No. 9, Fabric Object

Princeton, New Jersey, 2024

Fabric Object is a small show on the early career of Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, of Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects. There are seven projects, mostly unbuilt, all related to ideas of urbanism, presented through things made by hand. Drawings. Writings. What seemed important was to show an intimacy to their work, while also showing how impersonal it is. It may sound contradictory, but Agrest and Gandelsonas have always played with oppositional binaries. Individual-Collective. Building-City. Memory-Amnesia. Fabric-Object. Like the flip-flop reversibility of their axonometric drawings (think El Lissitsky Proun,) architecture appears as something and an inversion of that thing. They love design. They love non-design. Architecture is autonomous. Architecture relies upon the city. And so on. Maybe this is because there are two of them. With two, and is inevitable. Or perhaps their work is simply a product of its time, a collection of 1968 Pre-Post-Structuralist desires (think Barthes, Saussure, Kristeva, Lacan, etc..) brought into Architecture, ideas like Language as a Model (and Speech as a Model and Text as a Model,) Dialectical Opposition, Semiotics, Typology, Rejection of Authorship/Individualism, and so on. If you read their descriptions of their own work, they will tell you what everything means. This as That. That as This. They construct complex thoughts and arguments with their work, but they will also tell you that it can never mean any one thing, there is always and.

With and in mind, the exhibition includes multiple perspectives and thoughts on their work by Princeton School of Architecture faculty.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Andy Kim

North Gallery, Princeton University School of Architecture, Princeton, New Jersey, March 7–May 3, 2024

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Software No. 16, DROP

P5, 2023

Playing with video game physics again, mass, gravity, friction, and so on.  Real. Not Real. Color. Virtual velcro. Stuff we did at the beginning of the office. A subjectivity. A style. Our reaction against idealized form, geometry, the maniacal control of the Parametric. Letting things happen. Chance. A different complexity. Learning not to be so neurotic. Unlearning what we were taught. Architects only see the mistakes. We look for perfection. We see problems everywhere. Misalignments. It’s an occupational pathology. We always think we can make it better. This is looking for something else, casual, informal, joy, not sure.  We’re still trying to be okay with joy. It doesn’t come easily nowadays. An exercise to see differently. Totemic figures, stacks, shapes, sticky amalgamated objects. A kind of beauty.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ben Dooley

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Housing No. 17, Missing Middle

Chicago, Illinois, 2023

1 lot. 2 row houses. Adaptable to multiple lots. A lot. A larger lot. Another lot. Modular Construction. Ceramic panels on a lightweight structural frame. Everything arrives on trucks. Stacked. The roof collects rainwater and solar. Terraces, front and back. Ventilation. Light. The ground floor can provide additional revenue, a small store, an architecture office, a studio, a coffee shop, or another apartment. The second floor is the apartment, living, kitchen, bathroom, a small office. The third and fourth floors have bedrooms, shared spaces, a media room, a ping pong table or a library, or karaoke, or an indoor garden. They can have 2 bedrooms. or 6. 2 in 1 addresses housing through incremental development, variable mixed use, middle scale, low-rise high density that is economical and flexible.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Joel McCullough, James Wood

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Rug No. 1–5, Twice Woven

2023–Ongoing Series

Wool is handwoven into 25cm strips. These are woven again. It is twice-woven. They appear woven from a distance. They appear woven close-up. The loose weave gives its physical character, like something that was enlarged, an oversized detail of a flattened basket. Some historians think cities and buildings began with textiles. Our textile work began a few years ago, in a city. In Rome. We cut strips of paper and wove them together. We made models and drawings. We made different arrangements. We studied them. We made some small ones that we carried around with us in our notebooks. We made some larger ones that we pinned on the wall of our studio. We made some even larger, to sit on. We tried different colors. We tried patterns. We wanted it to look casual, informal. It took time.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample

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Greenhouse No. 2

Without A Specific Site, 2023–Under Construction

A lot of contemporary architecture looks like greenhouses. Some non-contemporary architecture too. Glass. Polycarbonate. Lightweight frames, with structure on display. Plants. A collection of small objects. Things floating within structural frames. Difference and variation, maybe for its own sake, maybe towards a multitude of beauty, maybe towards a diverse garden of architecture, maybe towards nothing in particular. 428 pieces, bolted together. Various species of aluminum parts.  About 380,000 plant species are known to us. We are surrounded and outnumbered. Community Gardens provided a place of retreat, of protest and consternation, of victory gardens, of  seed bombs, of non-western medicine and  self-care clinics and homeopathy, of collective responsibility and action, DIY green guerillas, and so on. Community greenhouses are a sort of urban infrastructure of small structures. Places to bring things and people together, to plant seeds and cultivate. This community greenhouse has a vented roof, workspaces on both the north and south sides and a mezzanine for more plants.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, James Wood

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Greenhouse No. 1

Without A Specific Site, 2020–24

At least one version of Modernism began with a public greenhouse, a so-called crystal palace with steel painted sky blue. This is aluminum. No paint, although possibly someday. Lighter. Recyclable. Reflective in the right lighting. Easier to carry and put together. Made from a kit of parts. Imbued with Gothic clarity, maybe. Crystalline-ish. Crystal Lite. 290 pieces, bolted connections. Manufactured in a factory. Assembled on site within a week. An instant bubble. An atmosphere. An environment. A totalizing experience. Ol factory. Designed to move, to travel almost anywhere. And plants can visit from anywhere. An instant garden. An instant community. A community greenhouse. An exotic display of difference. A collective. A place for people to visit to restore themselves and unwind and work and meditate and rest. An allotment to grow food, outside of the marketplace, outside of work. An alternate economy. A place to cultivate care. The possibility of something better.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, James Wood, Andy Kim, Ben Dooley

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Housing No. 16, With 38 Towers

Chacarita Alta, Asunción, Paraguay, 2019–Under Construction

The site is an informal settlement along a canal in central Asuncion, a 15 minute walk from the Government Palace of the President of Paraguay. Each unit of new housing replaces an existing dwelling and is for an existing resident. A spreadsheet was given. The residents’ ages, genders, family ties, disabilities, and illnesses like depression, high blood pressure, hypertension, bad hips, and so on, were give to us. Extended families were listed, and kept together. Spatial requirements were listed, for instance, if someone needs to be on the ground floor, or next to someone else, or in a specific location. Empathy via excel. No unit is exactly the same, because each site is unique and each resident is unique. Some single adults, a family of 10, everything in-between. Up to 5 generations. Not-nuclear. Sometimes nuclear. Some residents live in the 38 towers (a 3.5m x 3.5m plan with 4 stories, terraces and roof access) located on 12 unique sites, each with direct access to a public pedestrian street. Some live in the base level, which contains courtyard houses for individuals and small families with 79 total units, again with direct access to a public street. Commercial spaces were provided for businesses that were there before, and small pockets of shared public space. Topography, neighbors, and infrastructure define the limits of the building. The base plans are irregular and specific to their situation. A field of repetitive towers, resting on a field of irregular gardens. Light and air everywhere. A pedestrian city. Passive systems, sustainable, low energy, spaces for food production, not typical contemporary social housing. There were periodic meetings with residents and the Paraguay Ministry of Housing.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Tianyang Sun, James Wood

In collaboration with adamo-faiden and Equipo de Architectura

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A Book on Making a Petite École

Book, 158 pages. New York: Artist book, 2019; 2nd ed., Barcelona: ACTAR, 2022. 19" x 22" (original), 9.5" x 12.75" (second edition).

With contributions from Sebastián Adamo & Marcelo Faiden, Yussef Agbo-Ola, Sir David Adjaye, Xavi Laida Aguirre, Stan Allen, Benjamin Aranda, Assemble, Tatiana Bilbao, Bureau Spectacular, Marlon Blackwell, Galo Canizares & Stephanie Sang Delgado, Sean Canty, Jan De Vylder, Ambra Fabi & Kersten Geers, fala, First Office, Antón García-Abril & Débora Mesa, Go Hasegawa, Steven Holl & Dimitra Tsachrelia, Wonne Ickx/PRODUCTORA, Florian Idenburg & Jing Liu, Sam Jacob, Andrés Jacque, Johnston Marklee, Ladi’Sasha Jones, l’AUC, LEFT Architects, Toshiko Mori, Catherine Mosbach, Umberto Napolitano, Daniel Norell & Einar Rodhe, Lütjens, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Mónica Ponce de León, Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Bolle Tham & Martin Videgård, UrbanLab, Welcome Projects, WORKac with Ayah Wood.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Charles Dorrance-King, Julia Muntean, Ben Dooley
Graphic Design: Studio Lin

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Rooftop No. 1, Observatory, Canopy, Open Space

Brooklyn, New York, 2019

Once upon a time, people peered into the night sky searching for something, understanding that the moon, the planets, and the stars were connected with the earthly, the bodily. Observing our surroundings was a fundamental social and cultural act, something translated and recorded and represented, collected and contrived, posted and commented, told and retold. We built instruments to measure and map. To help communicate, help us understand our world and ourselves. Art and Architecture was one of these instruments, something that exists between here and there. Tall mounds formed, altars constructed, temples built, pyramids, domes, and observatories. This is a circular canopy, providing shelter from rain and the sun, allowing for different events, operating like an architectural instrument. The canopy collects various, almost ready-made, architectural elements: A Chimney, Deck, Roof, Dome, Stairs, Elevator, Sign…. This is a map, providing an experience of the night sky no matter the weather or light conditions, animating and enlivening the space below it. We can adjust the night sky map to a specific date or time to mark its importance, a sort of flattened Cenotaph of Newton. The canopy is a radiant surface. We partnered with Dr. Forrest Meggers to provide radiant heating and cooling, allowing for a more radically open observatory, a comfortable space for outdoor lectures, dinners and star gazing events.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, James Wood, Andy Kim, Ben Dooley, Yifei Yang, Joel McCullough

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Winery No. 1, In a Valley

Mendoza, Argentina, 2021–25

4 walls. Approximately 5.5 meters tall. Approximately 58 meters long. Almost north-south. 10 almost squares per wall. 40 almost squares total. The repetitive rhythm of structural piers. The soft irregular landscape. 3000 square meters built underground, filling an existing valley. The walls step up the hillside, looking like remnants of a dam of some long-dried-up river, overgrown. Something like the archaeological site of a Roman aqueduct or a forgotten James Wines project or a buried factory. It is where the natural world and the landscape surpasses any architecture. Orienting everyone who comes there to the ground around them, the vineyards and the mountains beyond. El Plato: 60km NW. Tupungato 80km SW.

Also, there were many studies for additional pavilions and furniture.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Tianyang Sun, James Wood

In collaboration with adamo-faiden

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House No. 22, With Sunken Courtyard

Location Withheld at Request, 2022

The house is built into the ground, with 1 story of collective, domestic spaces above ground, and 1 of individual, more private spaces below. Everything is connected by and revolves around the sunken courtyard. It is an object. It is a space. It cools and animates the house, filling the 2 stories with light and air and nature. Its rotation aligns with the cardinal directions. 9 skylights/solar chimneys dot the roof, bringing in light while passively cooling the interior. The house is focused inwardly. Everything is set in motion by patterns and shapes and what is above.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, James Wood, Tanya Al Saleh, Andy Kim, Ben Dooley

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House No. 21, With Large Eave

Jefferson, New York, 2021–22

A small house with a large eave. The exterior space under the eave is the primary space of the house. This space under the eave could be a porch, a bbq grill pit with picnic tables, a bike repair shop, a makeshift podiatrist office, a photo studio, a late-night smoking lounge, a yoga retreat, a place to store partially used items that don’t fit anywhere else, a local ceramic workshop that specializes in custom mugs, a kombucha startup, a karaoke parlor, a dog’s play area, a summer camp fingerpainting venue, a temporary dance club and mosh pit, a stable for livestock, a flea market, homeopathic garden, and a garage. The attic space within the eave is the bedroom. The bathroom and kitchen are on the ground floor. It didn’t require a large budget. It is for 2 artists to spend time in nature, and to occasionally think about birds.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Andy Kim, Ben Dooley, James Wood

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MANIERA 24 MOS

Brussels, Belgium, 2021

Furniture of a New Order, Zoë Ryan

“Furniture inhabits both the world we choose to call real and the world of our imagination.”

So begins curator Suzanne Delehanty’s essay, Furniture of Another Order from 1977. Nothing seems closer to the truth these days as so many of us spend hours traversing the real and virtual spaces of our desktops, slipping between the two in a constant state of shared reality. I came across Delehanty’s essay many years ago, drawn to how artists, architects, and designers approached the making—and imagining—of furniture, at times very differently. The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania had beaten many to the punch with the exhibition memorably titled Improbable Furniture, curated by Delehanty (her essay is published in the exhibition catalogue). In it, she called for a reexamination of this paradigm of quotidian objects through the lens of work by artists who have at some point situated furniture within their output, as in the work of Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Edward Kienholz, and Yayoi Kusama, or made it the very underpinnings of their practice, as in Scott Burton, for example. One of my favorite works in the show was Barbara Zucker’s Alice Inland from 1966, an oversized white wooden chair, nine feet high and crescent topped, that as Delehanty notes in the catalogue, “plays upon the viewer’s conscious and unconscious modes of thought.” The image of the work in the catalogue definitely plays with mine, generating discomforting echoes of “Off with her head!” as well as “Someone’s been sitting in my chair.”


Improbable Furniture appealed to me for its promiscuous take on furniture as the subject, and in some cases what determined the form, of the works on view. As Delehanty writes, furniture “can slip from the mundane to the metaphysical,” from objects that represent the world we inhabit to objects that through their scale, mode of production, and relationship to the body have become a never-ending means of experimentation, especially so in the case of the chair. Architects have throughout history also been drawn to furniture as a practical way to further probe human behavior and question social norms. Take as examples Gerrit Rietveld’s De Stijl chairs and Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair, Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand’s chaise longues and Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair from the early part of the twentieth century, or Charles and Ray Eames’ plywood versions from the 1940s. These now iconic designs grapple with everything from issues of form, production, lifestyle, an economy of means, and even hygiene. Chairs in particular continue to prove a never-ending source of inspiration, fascination, and fetish that’s hard to shake even in this saturated landscape. It seems there remains much to say.

When, for example, American architect Frank Gehry launched in the 1970s his now well-known line of chairs, ottomans, and chaise longues constructed from laminated cardboard, a utilitarian packing material found across the US, he called attention to his original intent, to create a more affordable, yet refined range. Once described as “paper furniture for penny pinchers” by the New York Times, given their lower price point (a lounge chair and ottoman were reported to be about $80 and under $30, respectively, when they launched in 1972) and availability at department stores such as Bloomingdales in New York and Marshall Field’s in Chicago, they are now coveted by collectors and in museum collections worldwide. More recently, Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye released his Washington series of chairs in 2013 as companions to the building he designed for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. The chair designs excavated references from both Africa and America, including the trade practices of the first African American slaves freed in the Southern states of America, who went on to create the visual iconography of towns such as Charleston and Louisiana. Adjaye’s team retraced the patterns of the architectural detailing of bronze balustrades and screens for homes, employing parametric modeling tools to generate a new articulation of these forms that shifts in density across both the seat and back of the chairs, to accommodate the body.

Since its founding in 2014, MANIERA Gallery has continued to provide opportunities for inventive minds to navigate between the realms of architecture, design, and art. Working to give space for ideas that expand current discourse, they recently invited Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of New York-based architecture studio MOS, to develop some objects for the gallery, with an open brief. The chair, or seating, again became a focus for their explorations. As Sample notes, “We’re interested in making things, not buying things. If we need a seat, we make it. If we need a table, we make it.” Furniture design has long been a part of MOS’s practice. For their design for MANIERA, they determined to investigate American approaches to furniture making. They focused on what they call “a brutal economy of scale,” no doubt in response to the contemporary moment, with the need to conserve resources, be mindful of waste, and treat invention as critical. Turning to Shaker furniture as inspiration, they have designed a number of pieces, including Baskets No. 1–3, multipurpose stools/baskets/seats, sturdy enough to sit on, stand on, and to hold objects.

The Shakers were nineteenth-century America’s largest and most well-known communal utopian society, boasting thousands of Brothers and Sisters in the early 1800s. Today only a handful remain, and yet their legacy is long. Their work ethic, high-quality output, and objects made to last are concerns that continue to have currency today. MOS’s design was also motivated by the exceptional craftsmanship of Shaker objects, especially the baskets that were a staple, made with an open hexagonal weave and sturdy enough to be used to harvest fruit or drain cheese curds. With its utility and stripped-down yet elegant form, Baskets No. 1–3 exemplify the Shaker code of practice to make something useful and necessary, but also beautiful, with any decorative elements part of the design and supporting the function of the piece. The bolts that punctuate them are both functional and are the only decoration, other than color, on the piece. Available in a range of sizes and scales, the baskets/stools can seat one or two people side by side. The only thing missing is two handles, which would have governed a Shaker basket, making it easier for a pair of workers to hoist a heavy load. Rather than wood, MOS’s baskets are made from a latticework of metal strips outsourced from fabricators who send the finished parts to MOS to do the final assembly. “We have the last say,” affirms Sample. Like the Shakers who were also fastidious about quality, they live with their designs, including “failures and mistakes,” which Meredith says they learn from. With an enthusiasm for a hands-on approach that was shared by the Shaker brethren, they test out their work in their studio and home to ensure that it is fit for its purpose.

MOS’s interest in weaving techniques was born a number of years ago when Sample made what she calls tape blankets. Living in the Netherlands, and without the time and access to a loom to weave in the traditional way, she acquired rolls of double-stick colored tape. She would peel off the tape and create blankets by sticking different pieces of tape together in a crisscross formation. “It became like a sort of weaving project,” she recalls. “It was an immediate, precise form of making something, unlike architecture. I liked that.” Sample’s approach speaks to the studio’s current fascination with working with what’s available, whether materials or manufacturing processes.

Object No. 11 (Peg Bench) and Object No. 12 (Peg Chair), also for MANIERA, are other cases in point. They underscore MOS’s satisfaction in finding off the rack components that they can repurpose for new uses. This time they appropriated thick wooden broomstick handles, cutting them down to size for the back and legs to create whimsical, yet practical designs whose material origins are a part of their appeal. Other pieces include Object No. 16 (Peg Rail), a reinterpreted Shaker design, typically hung on the wall and used for hanging up coats, keys, scarves, and other quotidian stuff, as a way to organize their communal homes. Updated by MOS, their wooden design can be screwed together in different arrangements to meet individual and collective needs. Another common object found in Shaker homes is the wood stove, which MOS has rethought with their Wood Stove No.1, made from simple component parts, such as a fire box fitted to a table, for outdoor gatherings. “One of the main values of the Shakers was a precise sense of utility, every object had a specific function” says Sample, “The objects we make typically have multiple uses – legs can be back rests, stoves can be tables, baskets can be stools, or something we haven’t imagined.”

The Objects of One Part, No. 3, like their baskets, are multi-functional objects. The pieces are made from identical perforated metal panels bolted together. The rounded form, reminiscent of a child’s toy, allows many different configurations, such as a stool, chair, table, or bench. Finally, the sectional lounge chair Object No. 17 (Circular Bench) is also made from metal and looks as if it was inspired by pew seating in a Meeting House. Erected from corrugated aluminum panels, it can be aggregated to form a circle or semicircle, making it fitting for congregating indoors or out. What MOS’s collection of works has in common is the rigor with which they approach their designs based on an economy of construction, an attitude that finds an affinity with the work of the late Italian designer Enzo Mari. MOS, like Mari, put emphasis on the value of objects that have become subsumed into our daily lives, their origins forgotten or taken for granted.

Just as artists shift perspectives and open our imaginations, design too has the potential to reinterpret the familiar in ways that not only offer new typologies of objects that prompt us to question and even modify behavior, but also open space in our minds for new thinking about the physical and metaphysical relationships we have with the built environment. As MOS has shown, rather than improbable furniture, their intuitive designs are resolutely probable.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Matthew Acer, Ben Dooley, Joel McCullough

Solo Exhibition, Maniera, Brussels, Belgium, June 19–September 18, 2021. Including Zoë Ryan, “Furniture of a New Order.”

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Casa No. 1–17

Book, 160 pages. Milan: Libra. Including Stan Allen, “[La città e la casa],” and MOS, “The Quote Un-Quote [Apro e chiudo virgolette].” 12cm x 21cm.

“The Quote Un-Quote”

We look back at our own work every so often, making sense of it. It is impossible. Something slips away. Something enters the scene. We never quite grasp it. Architecture especially. We try. Others help. Each sees what they want to see. Things say something, and then something different to another. None of us are totally right, but others might understand it better. Although, even if they told us, I’m not sure we’d believe them. We take it personally. Our work is personal. I’m unsure who said it first. But someone said your work is quote un-quote Neopomo. Neo-Post-Modern. They said we helped establish it in the academy. Someone else said we were leaders of the movement. These weren’t compliments. We didn’t even know NPM was a thing. We never cared about semiotics or signifiers or salmon-colored faux classical pediments. We don’t remember the classical orders, some of us. We never cared about architecture as a language. We never heard what architecture was saying. It only mumbles. We cared about building things, about materials, proportions, and construction. We liked vernacular architecture because it was practical, it wasn’t trying to mean anything, not because we were referencing something. Everything seems to reference something else nowadays. If you’re not working on a project of measurable data or technology or performance, then everything is in quotes, regardless of intent.

When we started, the world around us seemed to be about progress through technology, data, complexity, animation, fabrication, performance, simulation, mass customization, a newfound control over architecture. Anything other than that seemed regressive. That word neopomo sounded so weird. N-E-O-P-O-M-O. They spelled it out for us. We stared blankly in return, trying to understand if they were right. Maybe they were. Some people want history to repeat itself. We don’t. Although, sometimes it repeats itself regardless. Quote Un-Quote. Cute chubby objects. Axonometrics. Color. Aggregation. Typology. Square Windows. Maybe we thought it was good or beautiful, and not too expensive to build. Maybe we could do it with our own software, open source. Maybe we didn’t think enough. We liked little to no expression. We liked simple drawings and forms and shapes. We liked boredom. It seemed far more exciting than the supposedly exciting stuff. We liked blankness. We liked readymades. We liked vaguely familiar things. We liked economic construction. Pitched roofs don’t mean anything particular to us. They’re cheap. They work. We liked the overlooked beauty of the world around us. We didn’t like the work being about us. We disliked design’s classism and luxury. We liked Bernd and Hilla Becher photographs. We liked non-representation representation. We didn’t like technological expressionism. Too much technology. Technology can only be corporate nowadays. It’s all unseen. The corporate takeover of everything. It requires money, a lot of money. We are afraid of money. We don’t like what money does to the world. We didn’t believe the hyperbolic claims of progress, although we want progress, we want things to get better. It doesn’t seem better. We overheard a professor of public health say, when I hear architects talking about some new thing, or new material, I just think of the future health problems. If you’re thoughtful, nothing is as easy as it seems. We didn’t believe in a single institutional linear narrative for the field. We liked taking things apart. We liked putting things together. We liked buildings. We liked things in the world. We hoped our work offered a way of being in the world to others. We still do. Have you noticed how everything is related to something else. Every object has an infinite web of connections. They’re impossible to control. We don’t want to control them. Buildings just quietly sit there as the world changes around and within them. Perhaps it’s all about personal taste, perhaps it’s just two extremes playing out simultaneously – the incredibly personal and the vast array of references. We wanted a non-style style. We didn’t want fancy or expensive. We wanted to avoid something. We numbered. We repeated. We repeated with slight differences. We wanted to be personal without being expressionist. We weren’t of one mind.

Graphic Design: Studio Lin

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Exhibition Design No. 8, (662) MOS ARCH

Princeton, New Jersey, 2022

This exhibition presents the remains of an architectural office: a collection of objects – prototypes, books, sketches, models, notes, drawings, experiments, material swatches, paper with a concentration on smallness and smaller-scale work. The organization of the exhibition mirrors our little office, with a large table where things accumulate. Nothing is separated into categories or organized by project or theme. Everything simply exists together as part of a landscape of things that are made, with multiple scales, formats, happening in parallel and in conversation by their proximity.

When assembling work for the exhibition, we thought about our work as a sort of spam, spam architecture. As the artist Hito Steyerl writes in “Digital Debris: Spam and Scam,” “Contemporary electronic spam tries to extract an improbable spark of value from an inattentive crowd by means of inundation. But to become spam – that is, to fully identify with its unrealized promise – means to spark an improbable element of commonality between different forms of existence, to become a public thing, a cheerful incarnation of data-based wreckage.” While architecture is obviously different from spam, spam architecture is repetitive, inexpensive, and without signature. It circulates, relying on representation. And once you start looking for it, it is everywhere. The general mode of disciplinary communication as well as protest, theory, commentary, and self-promotion appear similar, as spam. Everything arrives, notifying us of its arrival. Everything tries to hold our attention. And then everything is quickly replaced by the next thing, and the next, ad infinitum. A lot of architectural representations circulating today feel like spam. MOS makes a lot of stuff, all the time, many times without clients, on many platforms, through various media. We ourselves are constantly reaching out, in the hope of finding a common ground within our fragmented attention. We produce spam architecture. And perhaps paradoxically, as much as we spam, architecture’s physicality, collaboration, and use (both functional and cultural) make it unlike spam. Although architecture repeats and circulates, it doesn’t need to constantly notify the world about what it is doing. It usually does this by simply sitting there quietly, sometimes on an office table, at even the smallest scale.

Curators: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ben Dooley, Carly Richman, James Wood, Andy Kim, Jacqueline Mix
Graphic Design: Studio Lin
Photography: Michael Vahrenwald
Exhibition Manager: Kira McDonald
Fabrication: Cole Cataneo, James Wood, Andy Kim, Ryan Shin, House of Varona

North Gallery, Princeton University School of Architecture, Princeton, New Jersey, February 22–April 22, 2022

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Vacant Spaces NY

Book, 608 pages. New York: ACTAR. 6” x 9”.

This project began by walking around our neighborhood noticing empty storefronts. Once we saw them, they were everywhere. They followed us, appearing quietly throughout New York City. Many with no signage, no “for rent,” no “coming soon.” Usually empty, sometimes dusty, sometimes with brown paper covering the glass. Now, vacancy has only increased. In the densest city in the United States. During a housing crisis. Throughout a pandemic. The quantity of vacant spaces is anyone’s best guess. It’s only partially documented. They hide in plain sight.
Within the city, there are multiple vacancies – retail, commercial, office – but storefronts and street-level spaces are the most noticeable. A majority are claimed as losses for tax write-offs. As we have found, some large vacancies persist for years. An insistence on higher rents inflates profits and value, maintaining inflated property values throughout the city. Meanwhile, an immense housing shortage grows worse.

The basic provocation of this study is that we do not need to solve large-scale problems with large-scale solutions, with more building, with additional infrastructure, with huge investments. Solutions exist that avoid developers and those who have continuously profiteered off of what should be considered a fundamental right. Possibilities exist that don’t take 5–8 years to develop, that reinvigorate street life, that don’t require massive investment with disproportionate returns, that are incremental and equitably distributed throughout the city. Housing and other social services should infiltrate our city through vacant space!

We look at these immense retail vacancies as akin to the loft spaces left as Lower Manhattan deindustrialized in the late 1950s and early ’60s. During this time, light manufacturing such as plastic warehouses, paper recycling facilities, and garment factories, moved from SoHo out of the city or went out of business entirely.1 Manufacturing changed. Vacant lofts transformed into inexpensive live-work spaces. Still zoned for industrial use, these lost apartments were illegal at first. But community groups formed quickly and fought successfully for policy changes. Sometimes solutions to problems are already here, around us, if we rethink our assumptions, if we imagine other possibilities, and if we organize.

This research documents a small portion of the vacant spaces in Manhattan: those that have been reported. We worked with students from Princeton University’s School of Architecture along with our architecture office, MOS, to document and draw the available data. New York City does not keep track of business or residential vacancies, instead relying on private companies to document and provide information. In their 2019 report on retail vacancy between 2007–2017, the City Comptroller contracted a private company, LiveXYZ, to document vacancies in the city. The information is opaque; their sources and methodologies aren’t clear. Larger, corporate real estate holders often report their vacancies as losses, but many others do not. Because of this, it is nearly impossible to understand the extent of vacant spaces in New York. Most data is under-reported. Harlem, where we live, is one neighborhood that is under reported. Our observations do not align with the reported data; we live our daily lives alongside entire blocks of vacant storefronts that are missing from data.

The following document is organized from large to small, general to specific. It begins by looking at vacancy within the United States and continues down to each Manhattan neighborhood, where we zoom into specific vacant spaces, where we have provided as case studies that imagine some possibilities for transforming current vacant spaces into housing or social services. There is also a section on Covid 19, which infiltrated New York during our research. As a whole, this document is not meant to provide specific solutions. The data is incomplete. Case studies are limited. We are not policy experts or data analysts or urban planners. Instead, it is simply meant to show something we have taken for granted, vacant spaces, taking part in a collective process of imagining a better city.

Notes
1 See Aaron Shkuda, The Lofts of SoHo: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ben Dooley, Andy Kim, Vicky Cao, Reese Lewis, Jacqueline Mix, Hannah Lucia Terry, Cristina Terricabras, Carly Richman
Graphic Design: Studio Lin

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House No. 20, With A Curve

Dutchess County, New York, 2019–2020

It began as a house for two families, and ended as a house for one. There was a pandemic happening. It was a process. We tried to do what they asked. The site is amazing. Remote. Wooded. Stone walls. They wanted something beautiful. Something that didn’t cost a lot. A place to raise children. Everyone wants architects to promise what it will cost. We don’t deal with this enough in school. We are asked to do the impossible. Something spectacular and responsible. Uniquely beautiful and affordable. Unlike anything we’ve done before, and similar. Something larger than legally possible. We looked through old sketchbooks, unearthed previous deadends. A curve was introduced.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Matthew Acer, Qiazi Chen, Reese Greenlee, James Wood

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House No. 19, On A Slope

Location Withheld at Request, 2018

Built into a slope. Half of an A frame. Oversized steps. It has a single large sloped roof supported by a grid of beams. Exposed structure underneath. A waffle. A cap to something. A lid. A coin. A funny beret. A satellite dish. A sign that fell over. Almost a circle. All the spaces sit under the large roof, shifting horizontally and vertically to create the living space, the kitchen and bedrooms. The bedrooms have triangle shaped clerestories. Maybe we will add a lower window. We like the space focused on the slope, on being on a slope. Light flows around and underneath. Maybe there will be a skylight. Maybe not, we’re afraid of leaks. Maybe there will be solar panels. Maybe not. There will be guards to stop snow sliding into the entry. The entry pad will be heated, no need to shovel. The earth provides thermal mass and insulation. It will feel warm. A hobbit hut. A place to hide. The North is protected. The South is accessible. The whole house is lined with windows on either end. It is entered from the top or the bottom of the slope. There are 2 entrances. In/Out. On/Off. Up/Down. In-between. Maybe.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Matthew Acer, Anam Izhar Ahmed, Qiazi Chen, Andy Kim

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“Over/Under”

Los Angeles, California, 2020

A holder of toilet paper.

“Over/Under” Marta, Los Angeles, California, September 10–November 1, 2020

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House No. 18, Along a Ridge

Columbus, Indiana, 2019–In Progress

Long and narrow. Based upon a 10’ sheet of plywood. Bends slightly. Following the site’s ridge. Perched, looking out. Surrounded with tall trees. 3 chimneys, 1 attic and 1 light well as volumes on the roof. It doesn’t look like a house, maybe something you’d find in a trailer park designed by William Morris, maybe Villa Le Lac. It looks like a wall, or a line. It is a straw sucking up space. It is a zipper stitching things together and holding them apart. It is a bent telescope. 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, a kitchen and living space that opens on to large decks overlooking the abundance of trees. There are wood burning stoves throughout to heat the spaces. There are passive ventilation chimneys. We like chimneys, too much. We can’t quit them. Bedrooms are on both ends. The central long space has some large and some small windows. Platforms and views radiate. A minty green spiral stair takes you to a small studio and the roof. A studio to draw and read and design very precise furniture. On the roof you can see the stars.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Matthew Acer, Anam Izhar Ahmed, Qiazi Chen, Cristina Terricabras

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Mixed Use No. 4, With 2 Spiral Stairs

Mexico City, Mexico, 2020

A corner lot. A nondescript concrete building. Bush hammered. Terrazzo. An unsurprising urban rectangular volume. Squarish. Parking below ground, open space on the roof. 2 apartments side by side. An architecture office in the base. Some prerequisites. 46 square openings. 34 Windows. Composed Non-Composed. 1 slipped. Stable Unstable. An entry. 2 cylinders. 2 spiral staircases at the building’s center. Ascending in opposite directions. Serving opposite sides. Rotational symmetry. Between 2 thick “walls.” Services and storage inside. Open space beyond. Bare. Flexible. Empty. Versatile. For work. For life. Lots of concrete. Collaborating, discussing possibilities. Waiting for the contractor’s approvals. The specifics were to be left up to the occupants. Use. Rent. Subdivide. Airbnb. Whatever. We all know how quickly things can change.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert, Lafina Eptaminitaki

In collaboration with Isidoro Michan-Guindi

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Apartment No. 3, With Large Skylight

New York, New York, 2020–23

An apartment with a large skylight. The top floor of an old artist’s loft. Plywood. Custom Furniture. Bar Stools. Stools. Table. Chairs. Daybed. Towel Bars. Hooks. Floor Light. Bits of Color. Generous. Space. Warm. Light. Wonderful client. Thoughtful. Kind. Not always easy during construction. Started with a pandemic, ended with a vaccine.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Joel McCullough, Qiazi Chen, Matthew Acer
Photography: Michael Vahrenwald

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Artist Retreat No. 2

Hudson, New York, 2019–In Progress

A long house collective art studio sunken into the ground.  Cabins for artists in residence scattered within a beautiful site. Overgrown. Art in the landscape. Serial. One after another. A series of small cabins. Some alone, some paired. Large thick living roof. T shape. Wild. 4 elements. A stove, slightly off-center. A roof, square and overhanging. An enclosure, in folded weathering steel, or maybe aluminum. A retreat. Square windows. A mound, on the roof. Or smaller mounds. Landscaped like the surroundings. Deep shelves as structural braces. Plywood interior. Material. Folded steel outside and above. Weathering Steel. Some horizontal, some vertical. Some filled with tapered insulation. Everything based on a 2’ grid. Think of architecture in terms of sheet material. As long as standard sheets will allow. We imagined building things ourselves. We do not want to build it, but do what we have to. We began with everything in metal and foam. We thought about the least labor. The least amount of processing of material. Large. Lightweight. Things started, stopped, started, stopped, and started again. Stopped for now.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Matthew Acer, Mark Kamish, Paul Ruppert, Lafina Eptaminitaki

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Studio No. 4, With Flat Roof

Location Withheld at Request, 2019

A studio with a flat roof. A studio for making things. Art or anything or almost anything. It is an assembly of 120 foam blocks and more than 600 pieces of bent aluminum. The foam is scaled for infrastructure, for highways and roads, the metal is more like a mail-order shed. A piece of furniture. Or an old tin toy. Still trying to convince someone to make a foam building. Things look simple, direct. Maybe cold. All this sits atop a thick slab, floating amidst a field of trees. A low res aircraft carrier. A lot of insulation. An overweight lightweight Wright. Like rock beanbags. The present configuration arranged 3 identical volumes. Stepping. But needs might grow, and volumes may be added. 3 might become 5, or 7. If it’s too expensive it might become 2 or 1 or nothing. Or everything might be moved to another site, another field. All services and storage are held to the studio’s center, alongside a spiral stair to the roof. The flat roof can become a flatbed surface of things, a stage, a backyard, a basement, a combine, a personal junkyard. The roof is a yard. A place to relax and for everything in progress, forgotten, imagined, referenced, bought, sold. A place for things you don’t know what to do with yet.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Paul Ruppert

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An Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures without Architecture

Book, 1,256 pages. London and Cambridge: MIT Press. Including Raymund Ryan, “Go Figure!,” and Martino Stierli, “Fare Buona Figura….” 8.25” x 11”.

“Architects Draw People,” by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample

Ask anyone, “What do architects do?” and most will reply, “Architects draw buildings.” They will likely imagine a myopic figure, often dressed in black, huddled at her/his/their desk, obsessing over details. This image is not all wrong, but architects also draw, add, copy, or notate people to go along with everything we make. It is impossible to represent architecture without representing the human. Even when the human presence is intentionally left out or is reduced to a faceless set of measurements, it haunts architecture in its absence.

As such, the point of this book, An Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures without Architecture, is to collect various architects’ representations of life into a single document. We began this project with no strong methodology other than to cast a wide net, scouring both library and Internet to collect drawings by architects we knew to produce significant buildings and drawings or those we simply thought of at the time. Then we deleted the architecture and context of these representations to focus specifically on the humans depicted by various architects or architecture offices. If we found nothing, we noted as much. While compiling all of these images, we were surprised to find that many architects simply do not represent people. Equally surprising, we found that architects who arguably have or claim nothing in common sometimes share an attitude toward scale figures (or lack thereof). Perhaps the absence of such figures is evidence of desires for the so-called posthuman; perhaps including people simply would have obscured representation of the architecture; or perhaps the architects just didn’t get to it. Throughout the Encyclopedia one can find architects who represent the human as inchoate scribbles, draw them by hand, exaggerate features, create a style, emphasize the geometric or mechanical aspects of bodies … And architects who reference other scale figures, collage themselves as scale figures, make political statements, want to portray a mood or attitude, want to make the human as uninteresting as possible, show only backsides or only silhouettes, are eclectic, and so on. One can also see the relationship to media and technology through how architects represent people: in gaussy, transparent Photoshop silhouettes; models collaged from lifestyle glossies and on-the-street fashion blogs; soft charcoal smudge-sketches; watercolors; full-color graphic illustrations; etcetera. We tried to include broad-ranging examples; but, when skimming the Encyclopedia, please accept our apologies for those offices and buildings we have neglected to include. We did what we could to be as inclusive as possible within the relatively narrow medium of architectural publications. After all, the point was never to be complete – an impossibility nowadays – but rather to be as broad as could be managed within our given resources. And we tried. We collected over 1,000 figures produced by over 250 architects, and (with a few exceptions) we present every figure at the same scale. Scale figures are a fundamental part of any professional’s arsenal; we architects have all amassed folders upon folders on our servers filled with these fictional people. And although scale figures are only of those things that most of us take for granted in day-to-day practice, they are no doubt a disciplinary problem, a fact which became increasingly evident as we assembled the Encyclopedia. It might seem naively absurd, but as we stared at the countless figures in this book it became hard to see them as anything but a kind of global citizenry. They are Architecture’s refugees. They travel the world, popping up from time to time on reviews, and in student work. And the more we looked at them, the more we thought about both the architecture offices that created them and the wonderfully diverse world we all live in – a world which seems ever more intolerant of difference and increasingly inhuman.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Michael Abel, Jacob Comerci, Taylor Cornelson, Michaela Friedberg, Paul Ruppert

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Object No. 14, Of 1 Part

A chair made from 1 part. Rearrangeable. Many different chairs possible. Designs we can’t think of yet. Maybe a stool. Enzo Mari in aluminum, sort of. Something like a 2 x 4, but different. The number of parts can change depending on use. Extra pieces can be used for ornament. Or to pile. It’s clunky. It depends on your mood.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert

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Housing No. 15, Co-living Rowhouse Prototype

Harlem, New York, New York, 2018–19

A co-living row house in Harlem. 6 stories tall. Efficient, whatever that means. Theoretically cheap to build, which might not mean anything. Theoretical cheap is an oxymoron. We ran some numbers. We think it’d be a nice place to live. Not sure if you agree. It’s nearly impossible to convince someone of beauty, if they don’t see it or are not open to it. 5 balconies look out onto the street. 5 balconies look out onto a backyard. The front and back of the building are separated by a collective core. Circulation. Utilities. Bathrooms. Stacked. The elevator clearance pops up. It’s polished stainless steel. Maybe there are solar panels. The roof is a garden. The ground is a garden. There is a shared garden next to the shared kitchen and dining. Collective spaces above and below. Places to gather, to find privacy, to read, to eat, to take a nap, to talk, to meet, to negotiate with others on how we should live.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Julia Muntean, Yam Chumpolphaisal

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Houses for Sale

Book, 126 pages. Mantova: Corraini Edizioni/Canadian Centre for Architecture. 22cm x 31cm.

At first glance, children’s books seem like the simplest things in the world. They are, after all, made for children. Their pages often seem casually organized, with a nonchalant and playful attitude. But the reality is the opposite: there is an incredible sophistication to the naiveté of children’s books. This is something, like most everything else, we have learned the hard way. Throughout its making, we treated this book as an architecture project; everything was considered and reconsidered, worked and reworked over and over again. With endless versions and variations stored away in our office somewhere, the book itself became a metaphor for the architectural discipline and its constant search for architecture.

We are grateful to both Corraini Edizioni and the Canadian Centre for Architecture for their encouragement, particularly Giovanna Borasi, without whom this book would have never happened. She was a constant source of advice, tirelessly challenging and encouraging us. To Mirko Zardini, a large child in the best possible way, for the humor and laser-precise insight of his edits. And to Albert Ferré and Jayne Kelley, whose shared efforts were indispensable.

None of this would have been possible without the hard work of our architecture office, especially Paul Ruppert and John Yurchyk, who have been critical throughout this long process and late nights. Many of the figures and drawings were only possible with the tireless support of Michael Abel, Mark Acciari, Fancheng Fei, Mark Kamish, and Zosia Nowakowska, The finishing touches of graphic design by Studio Lin brought the book into focus, Throughout the years, Alex Lin has become our deeply valued conspirator and confidante.

For us, no project ever ends. Each time we look at it anew, thinking about alternatives. What if we did this? Or that? This would be better. That looks like a mistake… After a while, it becomes impossible to look at anything as a child would; looking at this book now, we see only decisions. In such moments, we would place drafts of the book in front of two clients, our children Alice and James, who like all good clients would offer incredible insight and suggestions, and just enough disinterest to keep us motivated and moving forward. They are our constant reminder to keep the wonder of childhood present in both our work and life, and the ultimate reason for this book.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert, Michael Abel, Mark Acciari, Fancheng Fei, Mark Kamish, and Zosia Nowakowska

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House No. 17, With 10 Trees

Location Withheld at Request, 2018

Surrounded by 10 trees. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4. Beautiful Live Oak trees are on site. Never met a tree we didn’t like. Three trees long, two trees wide. Low-res. Like an 8-bit character. Windows and doors are interchangeable. A single, square entry. Slightly off. A blank elevation. The other sides open to the exterior. Clad in oversized polished aluminum siding. Another option had vertical folded panels. Shiny. Reflective. We assumed standard sheet sizes, folded, lapped. Economy. Economical. We have become experts in metal fabrication. Cheap without being cheap. Straightforward organization. Efficient. Services, circulation, and storage split the house in two. Kitchen/Living. Terrace/Bedrooms/Bedroom/Terrace. Roof Terrace. Blank, flexible spaces throughout. We looked at interiors in stone and plaster. Or concrete and wood. Things were left undecided.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Paul Ruppert, Charles Dorrance-King, Julia Muntean, Zane Mechem

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Pavilion No. 10, A Glass Spot

Toledo, Ohio, 2019

A proposal for a glass pavilion. A large column with a flat roof. A Nintendo mushroom. A Bernd and Hilla Becher photograph. An aluminum structure, built up of parts. Something like a kiosk, or a temporary café, or a water tower, or tree. It is both monumental and singular. Vaguely familiar. The base is clad in glass shingles. A wannabe Bruno Taut. A standard object with a new technique. The base can be large or small. A room or a pole depending on the circumstance. The canopy is circular. Perforated. A dot in Google Earth. It is covered in glass. Stripes. Polkadots. Something like a flattened disco ball. A glass spot. A place to gather. The structure is metal. Pieces are joined together with bolts. Perforations double as loose-fitting holes. It’s easy. It can be flat-packed, installed, demounted, and reinstalled anywhere. Its genericness makes it open and versatile. Its vagueness gives it meaning.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Yam Chumpolphaisal, Paul Ruppert, Lafina Eptaminitaki

 

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Hut No. 1, A Tent without a Signal

Bilbao, Spain, 2019

A tent. It is without a signal. It is without a noise. This might mean nothing to you. Inside your phone does not work. You cannot call your friends. You cannot email your boss. You cannot post your selfie. You cannot search. You cannot like anything. You cannot. If you want to know what the weather will be or send your location to someone do not bother. If you stay too long, you will get bored. Even quiet is exhausting after a while. This tent is like many and unlike many. It has a circular, O-shaped bench at its base and an X-shaped structure at its top. It is a hug and a kiss. It is closed and open. It is not a primitive. It is not a “primitive” primitive hut. Isn’t it odd how Technology and Nature have become inseparable? But maybe they always were. This structure is lightweight, made of aluminum parts that can be easily packed up and moved from place to place. Assembled it looks something like an antenna. And something like a tepee. It is not a beginning for architecture. It is not an origin. Origins are relative. Regardless, it makes a place to sit or take a nap or retreat or doodle or write this text you’re reading or plan a revolution. The fabric offers some shelter. The fabric is CNC knitted, stitching together electromagnetic field-shielding yarns. The fabric pattern was iteratively developed through homemade, handcrafted software that produces a field of noisy particles, like a landscape or T.V. static. The pattern does not repeat. The tent is neither high-tech nor low-tech. For the time being, it is temporary.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Paul Ruppert, Michael Abel, Stefan Klecheski, Nile Greenberg

“Architecture Effects,” Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, December 5, 2018–April 28, 2019
Curator: Troy Therrien

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House No. 16, With Extended Roof

Saratoga Springs, New York, 2018

3 deep beams support a long roof. It hovers. Disconnected. Floating. It isn’t. The sky is visible through cutouts in the patio overhang and eaves. We looked at different options. Different cut outs. Holes. The roof extends 24 feet past the front and back door. It is symmetrical. Maybe a little too long. A car is usually parked underneath. 4 evenly spaced square windows on the side. A larger window on its short side looks toward the lake. The top floor is for the parents. Everything they need on 1 level. They prefer to avoid stairs. Aging in place. The lower level is for visiting children. Everyone has their own space. And each looks out to the lake. The exterior cladding is made of corrugated cement panel with aggregate. We did some tests. We made some drawings. They wanted it cheap and fast. They make decisions as a family. We convinced some of them, but could not convince all of them.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Yam Chumpolphaisal, Paul Ruppert

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House No. 15, With 2 Chimneys

St. Louis, Missouri, 2018–22

Volumes. Brick. Volumes of brick. Stacked blocks of brick. Heavy. Sometimes symmetrical. Other times slipped, off-center, askew. Movement. Proportions. Surfaces of bonds and joints define volumes. They make things less stable. Small and squat. On one side, to an open garden. On the other, to private walled gardens. A house within a garden. And gardens within a house. Originally we had another walled patio garden for the living room that they removed. Maybe for the better. All living spaces on 1 level. A place to age in place. Things repeat. Pairs. Doubling. 2 identical bedrooms. 2 bathrooms. 2 closets. 2 private gardens. 2 chimneys, also symmetrical. These are familiar. Contextual, even. Someone called them ears when they were taller. Now they are shorter. 1 chimney is full of fireplaces and flues. 1 empty. A void over a shower, lit from above. It feels larger on the inside.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert, Matthew Acer, Charles Dorrance-King, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Claire Logoz

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Laboratorio de Vivienda

Book, 200 pages. New York: Artist book, 2019; 2nd ed., Barcelona: ACTAR, 2023. Including Giovanna Borasi, “A Large Urban Garden Where You Can Learn About Architecture.” 19" x 22" (original), 12.75" x 9.5" (second edition).

The 32 projects selected exhibit an architecture of primary (architectural) elements, straightforward geometries and proportions. Each proposal exhibits potential for growth by aggregation, simple repetition, or various strategies of extension, infill, and addition. It was important to consider how these proposals, assembled into a collective, would work together toward creating not an estate but a community for Apan.

The selection process revealed various categories and themes for which the projects could be classified. Some projects rethink the fundamentals of low-income housing’s spatial organization (corridors, courtyards, roofs), some rework labor and construction, and some recast structure or material. The forms of these works are generally economical but, unlike early-modernist projects at the Weissenhof Estate, their attitude is not one of a radical break. Today’s public will not protest flat (or pitched) roofs, and today’s architects will not claim to usher in a new style. If anything, these works relate to the vast, varied world of vernacular construction – to the majority of the built world that Architecture glosses over. Specifically, each house here responds to one of Mexico’s nine climatic conditions. At first glance, many of these works may not appear radically different from existing low-income housing. But upon closer study, the ingenuity of the selected projects becomes apparent as they become part of a larger whole and retain their individual identities.

The problem of low-income housing demands the thoughtful attention and expertise of architects like those included here. For, given the limited resources of such works, each decision gains greater significance and has greater impact on the design and on the life of its inhabitants.

Project team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert, Cyrus Dochow, Fancheng Fei, Michael Abel, Mark Acciari, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Mark Kamish, Ben Dooley

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House No. 14, A Room, Chimney, Cistern, and Roof

Location varies, 2018

A house. A room. A chimney. A cistern. A roof. Made of weathered steel, rust colored like the clay ground and everything else around it. 3 windows, 1 door, 2 skylights, 1 chimney, and 1 fire pit. An assembly of parts. The outdoor firepit is covered by an extra-large folded circle that doubles as a roof. The roof rests adjacent to the house, touching down lightly. Slightly askew, allowing water to drain. We’re told the 2 holes in the roof look like eyes. Especially at night, when illuminated by a fire. There is only 300 square feet of interior space. It was cheap, but not cheap enough. It was rejected. Eventually, we proposed it as a pop-up café. That was rejected, too.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Claire Logoz, Paul Ruppert

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Housing No. 14, Athletic Track No. 1

Olympic Park, Oaxaca, Mexico, 2020

An athletic track. A series of tracks. A series of lines. Things placed in tracks, in lines, along lines. Slow lines. Fast Lines. Walking. Running. Some lines are closed loops. Some lines extend. Some are segments. All are in a park. Some are walls. Some are walking paths. Some are hallways. Some are buildings. Some are a new running track slightly larger than the existing track that was there previously. Olympic standards. A cafe and bar on the top of a line punctuated with two exclamation marks. ..!..!.. Offices. A place to sit and talk. Bleachers. Storage. Locker Rooms. Linked together by lines. The athletes move along their own lines. The audience starts along the same line as the athletes but quickly diverges, and moves in parallel. The lines form vectors of movement, paths and perimeters. Various volumes, tall squarish volumes, punctuate the lines, a necklace, a charm bracelet, a series of small towers moving along the perimeter running their own race, repetition, movement, rhythm.

Housing is only a short walk away. Located along a different track. It is something else. A different performance. A place for the athletes and guests. A series of parallel paths. Lines. Structural spans. Short cuts. Pedestrian streets. Lines punctuated by stair cores. Interrupted Lines. A mat building made of a series of rooms. Cellular. Individual Bedrooms and Bathrooms. Shifting. Shared laundry. Shared kitchens. Shared dining. Shared gardens. Always a little bit off. Random. Disjointed. Moving along the lines. Little parks. A courtyard. A meeting spot. Another courtyard. It fills the site like a carbonated liquid. Bubbles. It’s its own world. A collective communal world. More open than it seems. More connected than usual, with spaces to be alone.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Paul Ruppert, Yam Chumpolphaisal

Part of Larger Master Plan with Studio ZV

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“Readymades Belong to Everyone”

New York, New York, 2018

Swiss Institute, New York, New York, June 23–August 19, 2018
Curators: Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen

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Exhibition Design No. 7, A Table To Put Things On

New York, New York, 2018

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Paul Ruppert

Center for Architecture, New York, New York, April 12–July 7, 2018

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A Book of 44 Low Resolution Houses

Book, 152 pages. Princeton: Princeton School of Architecture. 9.25” x 13”

This book contains 44 houses by 44 architecture offices:

6a, Adamo-Faiden, Angela Deuber Architect, Atelier Barda, Atelier Bow-Wow, Besler & Sons, Brandlhuber+, Bruther, Bureau Spectacular, architecten de vylder vinck taillieu in collaboration with Joris Van Huychem, Edition Office, Ensamble Studio, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism in collaboration with Aixopluc, fala atelier, First Office, GAFPA in collaboration with Stabico Ingenieurs, OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, Go Hasegawa and Associates, Hans Tursack, HHF and Ai Weiwei, Independent Architecture, Johannes Norlander Arkitektur, Johnston Marklee, The LADG, Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten, MAIO, Monadnock, MPdL Studio, MOS, New Affiliates, OFF-OFF, Outpost Office, PARA Project, Pascal Flammer, Paul Preissner Architects, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Point Supreme, PRODUCTORA, Stan Allen Architect, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, Tato Architects, T+E+A+M, Tham & Videgård Arkitekter, and WORKac.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert
Graphic Design: Studio Lin

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Exhibition Design No. 6, 44 Low-resolution Houses

Princeton, New Jersey, 2018

The house has an exhaustive history in architecture. It has been a protagonist of formalism through modernism and postmodernism. It has been a recurring problem for urbanism. Simultaneously, it has been considered a solution for urbanism and a problem for formalism (think: Levittown). The house has been at the center of phenomenological questions (dwelling), a frequent site of the everyday vernacular, and the primary subject of the digital/virtual (complex, animate, and dematerialized). But for this particular exhibition, houses were chosen simply because there are a lot of them circulating on the internet, available to gather. As such, the house has seemingly become more and more of a desirable design object, an image, a stage set, a thing, a product in how it is both made and culturally understood. The house reflects not just who we are but, increasingly, who we desire to be and how we project our identity. The house has become a receptacle for identity and technology, similar to our phones.

“44 Low-Resolution Houses” thinks about houses through a double technological and representational-aesthetic lens. All 44 houses fall into one or more of the following categories of low-resolution: first, houses that vaguely resemble houses, using familiar house elements like pitched roofs, chimneys, windows, doors, porches, etcetera; second, houses that appear to be constructed, in that one can see the construction, joints, and materials, and have a sort of cheap, unfinished quality; and third, houses that are composed of basic geometric primitives – squares, circles, triangles – arranged (primarily planimetrically) in a noncompositional or abstract manner. By these terms, low-resolution is against high-resolution architectural sophistication, gestural complex curvature, bodily organic figuration, and architectural paradigms focused on seamlessness and integrated smoothness.

This polemic, framed through resolution, suggests that high-resolution architecture operates as a form of distraction, a special effect, while low-resolution architecture engenders attention by being slightly off, crude, or abject. The loss of resolution directs us to think about architecture’s construction, its techniques, references, typologies, and materiality, while high-resolution glosses over the architectural object. Low-resolution includes glitches, gaps, the handmade, and abstraction, while high-resolution is an expression of complex technological expertise, where the ultimate desire of technology is to disappear into its environment. Low-resolution forces us to pay attention, to focus, to construct a reading of the architecture. As technology moves toward a seemingly unmediated, individualized expressionism, a world of constant distraction, “44 Houses” suggests a counterpoint: the (renewed) need to slow down, to study, to compare… to take apart architecture and look for specificities, to construct narratives, to perform analysis, to be attentive to our attention… and to take pleasure in the work of reading, of making comparisons, of constructing architectural values, rather than simply seeing, desiring, using, or being amused and distracted.

Each house is given a number and removed from its context, treated like an untethered object or image. All 44 houses are re-represented in the same medium (CAD lines plotted on 100-pound white Bristol paper), at the same scale (1/4”=1’0”), which allows comparison of the houses without comparing representations.

Some obvious curatorial decisions were made regarding the exhibition and this catalog. Each house is given a number – from 1 (6a) to 44 (WORKac) – and is removed from its context, which is arguably a source of debate. For better or worse, each house is treated like an untethered object or image, which is how we mostly experience architecture anyway. (Architecture is only produced through its circulation.) All 44 projects are re-represented in the same medium (CAD lines plotted on 100-pound, white Bristol paper), at the same scales (1/4”=1’0” [models] and 1/16”=1’0” [plans]) and with the same orientation (north). This was done so that we might compare houses without comparing representations. Additionally, each architecture office was asked to provide a material sample, product, or building element to represent its house at full scale. The exhibition oscillates between model as image (the primary view of the exhibition through the exterior window, the photo-studio environment and lighting), image as model (CAD working drawings printed on paper then folded into models), and model as model (material samples and building products). It was staged as if everything was floating, on display.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert
Graphic Design: Studio Lin
Photography: Michael Vahrenwald

North Gallery, Princeton University School of Architecture, Princeton, New Jersey, September 11–November 9, 2018

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House No. 13, Parts Collected

Los Angeles, California, 2018

An idea. A house made of blocks. Triangles, rectangles, half-circles, squares. Blank looks. A child’s toy. No square windows. Square skylights. Glazing. Interior-oriented. Privacy is important. Small exterior spaces throughout the inside. A connection to nature, sky, air, light, vegetation. This is a proposal for an economically viable scheme for additional rental housing. Accessory Dwellings in LA. Dense Backyards. Endless Variations for different sites. Rhythmic Progression. Everything is prefabricated. Stacked and assembled on site with a small crane. It is easily built and easily constructed. It’s like modular concrete drain pipes. Everything fits on a flatbed trailer. Everything can be assembled quickly. It is systematic. Wall. Vault. Sawtooth. Chimney. It repeats, but not always be the same. It can adapt. It can grow or shrink or be reused.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert, Michael Abel, Stefan Klecheski, Lafina Eptaminitaki

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Model Furniture No. 6, Ladder

An aluminum ladder. Made from 9 parts. 3 steps. Nothing too cumbersome. Ladders are important tools. We always want things we can’t reach on our own. This one is for lightbulbs, painting, or the general procurement of books. A useful object for the kind of chores you often procrastinate.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Michael Abel
Photographer: Michael Vahrenwald

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Artist Retreat No. 1, Within a Field of Agave

Joshua Tree, California, 2018

A master plan for cabins in Joshua Tree. A desert commune. A hotel. There is a wall around the entire complex. Inside, there is a field of rooms scattered in a grid. A farm. Each unit is on a plinth. The room and the bathroom meet at a 43 degree angle. It’s compositional. A little off. Everything is open. Large square windows double as doors. Plinths become porches. Somewhere to sit. Every unit has a tall chimney. Abruptly vertical like a yucca tree in a desert field. There are other buildings within the wall. A market. A cabana. A gallery. A little village.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Michael Abel, Paul Ruppert, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Yam Chumpolphaisal

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House No. 12, With 98 Foam Blocks And 8 Doors

Location Withheld at Request, 2017

Made of insulation. Insulation as structure. 98 Blocks of Foam with 8 Doors. A typical house is made of layers and layers of specific products. Of countless seams and assemblies. This house is not like that. It is an experimental prototype made from EPS foam blocks. The blocks are large, almost monoliths, almost megaliths, foam megaliths. The EPS factory is nearby. Architecture is like food, the less processing, processes, labor, shipping, people are involved the more sustainable it is. Assembly takes 4 days. The foam is coated with a rough cement or stucco finish or something else. The roof is a Ziggurat. It looks like stacked blocks from the distant past. A children’s toy. $200,000 to build. Cheap. Crude. Durable. Light, although looks Heavy. Beautiful, like a cave, a fake cave. Somewhere between Frank Lloyd Wright and a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Mark Acciari, Paul Ruppert, Michael Abel

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Housing No. 13, At the University of Arkansas

Fayetteville, Arkansas, 2018

12 Public Squares, 174 Units, 3 Streets, 2 Parks, 4 Art/Incubator Spaces, 6 Artist Studios, 264 Parking Spaces, 148 Trees,… This proposal works with 5 familiar pedestrian-scale urban typologies: street, townhouse, perimeter block, park, and public square. The townhouse units are organized vertically around the street, but rotated, producing thin well-lit buildings with air/cross-ventilation and solar panels, reducing their energy needs. The ground level is organized horizontally, as an informal open framework. This new communal ground brings together different activities: shared kitchens, dining spaces, art retail, incubator/innovation spaces, studios, other urban programs, parks and public squares.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert, Michael Abel, Yam Chumpolphaisal

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Model Furniture No. 5, Table

We tried to imagine something modular yet monumental. A very large table. We love big tables. There are 2 pieces for the table top and 17 for the legs. You could have more or less if you’d like. To avoid being goth this one sparkles.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert, Mark Acciari

“‘No-Thing,’ an exploration in aporetic architectural furniture,” Friedman Brenda, New York, New York, January 18–April 14, 2018
Curator: Juan García Mosqueda

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School No. 3, A Petite École

Versailles, France, 2018

Petite École is a 1 room, open-air design school for young children. It is a place for looking and making, and for making and looking. It is 688 aluminum pieces modeled, flattened, cut, folded, prefabricated, shipped, and then assembled onsite by a few people in a few days. It is made to be reassembled. It could be constructed anywhere and elsewhere. We imagine different contexts. It looks low-tech. We made large paper models by hand. It looks high-tech. We made parametric fabrication files. We photographed. We sketched. We looked at various angles. We adjusted the elements. We lowered the eaves. We tried other proportions. These look good for the moment. It looks industrial. It looks familiar. It looks abstract. It is made of building elements: a long, low roof with columns and stacked beams holding it up. It is made of folded aluminum. It has a sign made of folded aluminum. It has furniture made of folded aluminum. It is meant to be looked at. It is meant to be inhabited. It is meant for others’ enjoyment. It is a stage. It makes other stages. We look. It looks. We make. It makes.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Charles Dorrance-King
Structural Engineer: Bollinger + Grohmann Ingenieure, Paris

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Object No. 12, Peg Chair

A seat for 1 person with a back and 4 legs. Made from 2 parts. 7 dowels. 1 circle. Our rabbit.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk

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Object No. 11, Peg Bench

A bench with a back. A long seat for several people. Made from 2 parts. 13 dowels. 1 rectangle.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk

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Exhibition Design No. 5, Storefront with 4 Windows

New York, New York, 2017

An exhibition of souvenirs at Storefront. Souvenirs are inseparable from urbanity. Hats, aprons, T-shirts, paperweights, pens, mugs, postcards, trinkets, doodads. All with something on them, something you don’t want to forget. All for sale. All made to circulate. You don’t even have to go to the actual place. Anything can be printed on anything. Storefront is famous for its openings. A specific tectonic. A sort of rustication. Unique shapes. Iconic. Novel. We changed them. They’re more boring. They’re less unique. Squares. They relate to the building above. Added polychronic-holographic, dichroic vinyl windows. Rock clips hold the glass in place.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk, Stefan Klecheski, Paul Ruppert, Fancheng Fei, Mark Acciari, Nile Greenberg, Michael Abel, Mark Kamish, Jiahe Chen, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Stephen Froese, Tommy Kim, Marc Mascarello, Kig Veerasunthorn

Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, New York, September 16–December 9, 2017

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Housing No. 12, On a Slope

Washington, DC, 2018–22

Previously left off of maps. A difficult corner. A leftover site. An excluded community. Affordable housing for the formerly homeless.13 row houses total. 26 apartments. An argument for shared communal park space instead of a parking lot. Developers care about money. They call it a product. They sell products. We use different languages. We have different values. We designed more units than they thought possible. More product. We thought this would help us negotiate for better materials, larger windows. The buildings step slightly along the existing grade. Units stay level. Parking underneath. Park behind with direct access. The site is an odd shape. A 5-sided irregular polygon. The housing is 2 trapezoids. It worked out that way. The geometries shift in plan and section but the windows align, holding everything together. We had roof patios, but they were value engineered out. A series of small tragedies. Cheap materials. Money almost always wins. They care little about design. They think vinyl flooring is good enough. They laughed at our concerns. Apartments on the tapered ends have the most windows. Every unit has a light well. Every facade is the same. Everything repeats. Large windows. Light. Air. Interlocking duplex units. 3 floors for 2 apartments. There is a beauty in basic things. Maybe typology, scale and proportion is all we have.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Yam Chumpolphaisal, Charles Dorrance-King, Robert Crabtree, Michael Abel, Nile Greenberg

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Housing No. 10, With 2 Courtyards

Washington, DC, 2017–21

An awkward corner. Twin volumes interconnected. Twin courtyards apart. A shared base. A triangular exterior park on the corner. A 23 degree angle. A 31 degree angle. Acute and Scalene. Trigonometry not calculus. Things that lean on each other. Twins. Couples. They need each other. We need each other. Perhaps we always find anthropomorphic qualities in things. Selfies. Two blocks trying to fit in. A square and a rectangle cross paths. The intersection is circulation. 2 U-shaped hallways. Horseshoes. Cross-ventilation in the units. Large windows at one time. They made them smaller. Developers telling us what to do. Developers who act terrible at times. It’s nothing like school. It is what the market wants. Value Engineering. Cheap materials. Contractors telling us what to do, even if it doesn’t make sense. Sales consultants. Everything is local. Reason doesn’t always win arguments. Good clients are hard to find. They want a deal, want you to make them money. Nothing is as transparent as it should be. If only everything was more transparent. We all prefer to not talk about the details. What is easier. What is less of a risk. Maybe we should embrace it. Or not. Standard cheap construction of a different typology. Somehow this is both different and completely average.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Charles Dorrance-King, Robert Crabtree, Yam Chumpolphaisal, Michael Abel, Nile Greenberg, Lafina Eptaminitaki

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Housing No. 8, Laboratorio de Vivienda

Apan, Mexico, 2017–19

A housing laboratory. 32 houses made by 32 architects. Each house is a prototype. It is in many contexts. It is here as well. An experiment. A model. A proposition. These are models for low-income workers housing. We selected each project specifically. We asked each selected architect to present vernacular references. With limited resources, each decision gains greater significance. A $10,000 budget per house. Some projects rethink spatial organization. Some re-work labor. Some recast material. Each one is regionally specific. Hot. Wet. Tall. Thatched. Shingled. A field of alternatives. Scattered. Assembled into a collective. Together, they create a neighborhood. A shared space in-between. An attitude. Separately, they maintain their individual identity. A place for learning. A park. A future ruin. We designed the Welcome Center. It is sort of a formal entry. Something permanent. Porous. Pale Pink. Not enough green yet. A place to view from. To sit. The roof is a garden of cacti. The roof is a lookout platform. A long bar. 7 circles. 4 squares. Inside rooms are sometimes classrooms, sometimes a cafe, sometimes living rooms, or lecture halls. It’s not prescriptive. It can be rearranged, rethought. It’s a gallery. It’s a school. It’s not specific. The problem of low-income housing demands thoughtful attention. Addressing problems around the economics of construction is necessary. There is light. Shade. Air. There are various parts that come together. We can only set the stage. A place to grow from. To explore.

Project team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Cyrus Dochow, Paul Ruppert, Fancheng Fei, Michael Abel, Mark Acciari, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Mark Kamish

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Pavilion No. 9, Arper

Proposal, 2017

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Mark Acciari

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Housing No. 7, Territorio de Gigantes

Aguascalientes, Mexico, 2017–18

Part of a collaborative master plan – a patchwork of concrete paths, terraced brick-and-landscape plazas, and paired residential blocks – the proposed buildings create an open, social ground and the free, flexible use of communal space. Residential levels are lifted off the ground, supported by 8 concrete piers and 2 frame-and-block cores. These paired cores – 1 for stairs and 1 for bathrooms, in-unit laundry, and services – connect 2 open, flexibly programmable social spaces at the ground and roof levels. Finished in the same brick as the surrounding plazas and paths, the public ground flows freely into large covered plazas. These are shady respites from the sun and somewhere to stop for a coffee, have a late lunch, hold a meeting, buy a coffee or morning newspaper… places for a community center and library, daycare, or live-work space… or somewhere to park one’s bike. Open and unprogrammed roof terraces offer a similar potential for communal, collaborative use at a smaller scale by the residents of each structure.

Apartment units fill the 7 open sections of this near 9 square frame, a central common wall between structural cores defining 6 units in 3 sizes. Terracotta brick vaults and painted concrete joists run from generous, central kitchens to the 13 operable, floor-to-ceiling windows at each apartment’s perimeter. Together with the ceiling slab, earthen tile and terracotta plaster walls create a warm, monolithic interior; each unit’s central kitchen and its 2 sets of sliding doors are the only exceptions to this palette. Able to quickly separate or join center and corner rooms, these doors offer the flexibility to connect all spaces into a kind of loft, close off space for an at-home business, or create a guest room for visiting family, a nursery, a…

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert, Michael Abel, Fancheng Fei, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Yam Chumpolphaisal, Claire Logoz, Steve Martinez

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Housing No. 6, Saltillo

Saltillo, Mexico, 2017–18

A concrete framework that contains one courtyard, 1 ground-floor commercial space, 2 staircases (1 shared and 1 private, intertwined), 2 roof terraces (1 shared and 1 private, separated) and 4 duplex units. Units No. 1 and No. 3 face a rear yard and wrap the courtyard with private hallways, stairs, and balconies; units No. 2 and No. 4 front the main street. All residences include a living area, kitchen, storage space, and laundry on their public first level, as well as 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, and additional storage on a second level. Rough. Generous.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Michael Abel, Cyrus Dochow, Lafina Eptaminitaki

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Software No. 15, SAND 2

New York, New York, 2019

A Processing script made for piling sand. A flatter cruder version of an earlier Sand. The sand here is small, rounded, granulated pixels. You can create sand by moving the cursor across the screen. Something like the brush tool in Photoshop. But this isn’t static. Sand never disappears. It just falls, piles, and slouches at the bottom of the window. You can add holes or wind, or adjust gravity or color. 1,789,677,819 grains of digital sand fall. 256 Hexadecimal colors available. 56 iterations.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Man-Yan Lam, Adam Ainsley

“Drawing Codes, Vol. II,” Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. Gallery, The Cooper Union / Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, New York, January 22 – February 23, 2019
Elmaleh Gallery, University of Virginia School of Architecture, Charlottesville, March 18 – April 22, 2019
Korach Gallery, University of Miami School of Architecture, Miami, August 9 – October 19, 2019
Gould Gallery, University of Washington College of Built Environments, Seattle, February 3 – March 13, 2020
Hubbell Street Galleries, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, September 1 – October 8, 2021
Curators: Andrew Kudless, Adam Marcus

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Art Space No. 3, With a Mezzanine

New York, New York, 2017–20

A tall, plain concrete space with a door directly to the street. The glass block was there when we arrived. A mezzanine inserted, a gallery. And an apartment, maybe. Its use is uncertain. It is made of concrete, plywood, plaster, steel, and aluminum grating. It feels industrial, like a factory. There are dots on the floor. Or perhaps they are spots, instead. It has silver mylar curtains, like that other New York Factory. Deep concrete beams structure its lighting. It is a platform. For art. For life. For something yet to be determined.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Charles Dorrance-King, Fancheng Fei

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Art Space No. 2, The Kitchen

New York, New York, 2017

We were asked to provide a proposal. We made a proposal. This one, for an institution we love… Sometimes we are in the business of predicting the future. Almost everyone wants to know what they will get before they get it. We do too. It was hard to know what exactly to propose. We did research. Gathered archival images. From Laurie Anderson to Sara Magenheimer. We made a timeline. We made a book of our proposal. A love letter of sorts. It was very detailed. Probably more work than it was worth. We proposed something flexible. But specific. Maximizing space for art. Mechanical systems, as efficient as possible. Spaces for dance, theater, art, music, happenings, and other things yet unknown. Vague parameters. Hopeful.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Michael Abel, Nile Greenberg, Paul Ruppert

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Tower No. 1, & Another (Chicago Tribune Tower)

Chicago, Illinois, 2017

Whatever this is, it is on the verge of nothing-in-particular. It is a ghostly figment of something, constructed out of structural, cast-glass blocks. It is an average. It is ambiguous. It is a technical marvel. Maybe it is a knowing wink and nod toward quote-unquote history. Maybe not. It couldn’t care less or more.

Exhibited at the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017, curated by Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee
Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk, Mark Acciari, Nile Greenberg, Paul Ruppert

In collaboration with John Hogan and Nat Oppenheimer/Silman Engineering

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Reject No. 1–15

Arguably Modernism began through various rejects. (The Salon des Refusés of 1863.) We like to think of our work rejected by clients in a similar manner. This first reject is from a prototype for a stool.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Mark Acciari, Paul Ruppert

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House No. 8, Image No. 1, with Layers and Masks

Chicago, Illinois, 2017

A model of an image. A Photoshop file pulled apart into its layers and masks as a stage set. The constructedness of our images.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Mark Acciari, Paul Ruppert

“Spaces Without Drama or Surface is an Illusion, but so is Depth,” Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, Illinois, February 16–July 2, 2017
Curator: Wonne Ickx

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“Screenshots, Photographs, Videos, Totes, Rocks, Stools, Candles, Soap, Vases, Blocks, Quilts”

Columbus, Ohio, 2016

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Mark Acciari, Michael Abel, John Yurchyk
Photographer: Troy Malmstrom

Solo Exhibition, Banvard Gallery, Knowlton School of Architecture, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, August 24–September 23, 2016

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A Situation Constructed from Loose and Overlapping Social and Architectural Aggregates

Book, 128 pages. New York: Artist book, 2016; 2nd ed., Baunach: AADR Publishing, 2016. Including Ana Miljački, “We Have a Situation,” Jack Self, “Urban Relativity,” and Troy Conrad Therrien, “MOS Defiantly.” 19" x 22" (original), 12.75" x 9.5" (second edition).

If urbanism once structured modern social identity – lending us a facade, an image of the individual within the collective – today it is our identity that structures the city. Identity and community are no longer static (or even slow-moving) constructs with rigid hierarchies. Loose affiliations and networks are superimposed over the traditional structures of families and institutions. In our present situation, urban form cannot maintain a strong correlation to the social. Everything is desperately trying to keep up with everything else. Our proposal works with and within the overlapping and disaggregated connections between urban and social form.

The Dequindre Cut, a former railway line, is a sunken, somewhat autonomous path connecting the Detroit River walkway and Eastern Market. It indiscriminately splits and connects the city, where urban areas are no longer distinct from non-urban spaces. Situated above and around the Cut, our proposal uses a low-rise, high-density development – produced through the loose arrangement of empty types, frameworks, and open spaces – to connect existing conditions into a new urban fabric. At ground level, a neighborhood of common spaces connects community with Cut and existing street system. A series of spiral ramps punctuate the structure, connecting all levels with pedestrian and vehicular traffic. A perennial garden and plaza extends across the roof, creating a network of spaces for recreation and social gathering. Thin buildings maximize the surface area of their facades, and in turn maximize daylighting. The structure and circulation are based upon the economical models of highway and parking structures. The collection of buildings, of emptied typologies, serve as open frameworks for something else, by someone else to happen; they are owned collectively, they do not front streets, and they work outside conventional notions of property and lots. The thresholds between interior and exterior – roofs, ramps, porches, and overhangs – provide informal areas for neighbors to commune. Every exterior space is a public space; every interior space is a public space. Staged intimacy is our social mode. Within each framework, shared spaces and circulation consolidate utilities like Wi-Fi, composting, and recycling. District heating and cooling, centralized parcel receiving/shipping stations, and small-scale commerce connect together the community at a neighborhood scale within the larger fabric.

This city, this situation, is one in which the relationships between things exceed individual spaces and buildings. Urban stuff drifts and interacts without concern for zoning, street, or the parcel logic of cities. Apartments, Record Stores, Electric Car Showrooms, Bike Shops, Community Centers, Florists, Vegan Doughnut Shops, Police Stations, Convenience Stores, Nondescript Offices, Coworking Spaces, Toy Stores, Candle Makers, Gastropubs, Green Dry Cleaners, Local History Museums, Maker Spaces, Public Pools, Greenhouse Nurseries, Cupcakeries, Stationery Stores, Lingerie Boutiques, Food Co-ops, Hardware Stores, Comedy Clubs, Ice Rinks, Religious Congregations, Microbreweries, Psychics, Montessori Schools, Post Offices, Shuffleboard Courts, Locksmiths, Spice Shops, Veterinarians, Governmental Administration Offices, Pharmacies, Laundromats, Groceries, Farmers’ Markets, Libraries, Bakeries, Conference Centers, Bikram Yoga Studios, Tattoo Parlors, Used Bookstores, Tuxedo Rentals, Hydroponic Farms, Cat Cafés, Karaoke Lounges, Gluten-Free Confectioneries, Artists’ Studios, Sewage Treatment Facilities, Computer Repair Shops, Pet Boutiques, Culinary Laboratories, Health Clinics, Beer Gardens, Law Offices, Dentists, Steakhouses, Pawn Shops, Beauty Salons, Funeral Homes, Breweries, Greasy Spoons, 24-Hour Diners, Department Stores, Opticians, Delis, Gymnasiums, Consignment Shops, Accountants, Whiskey Bars, Fashion Showrooms, Notaries, Burger Joints, Jewelers, Florists, Chess Clubs, Secret Societies, Ice Rinks, Pizzerias, Design Collectives, Day Care Centers, Nightclubs, Fitness Centers, Antique Stores, Test Kitchens, Butchers, Start-Ups, Concert Venues, Good Art Galleries, Bad Art Galleries, Hotels, Wine Stores, Zumba Studios, Taquerias, Fruit Stands, Shoe Stores, Dim Sum Halls, Tailors, Casinos, Insurers, Nail Salons, Pop-Ups, Travel Agencies, Banks, Soup Kitchens, Barber Shops, Juice Bars, Martial Arts Academies, Firehouses, Thrift Shops, Ice Cream Parlors, and of possible relationships. – produce a density of possible relationships.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk, Andrew Frame, Mark Acciari, Philip Denny, Jason Bond, Steve Gertner, Mathew Staudt, Sarah Wagner, Fauzia Evanindya, Fancheng Fei, Griffin Ofiesh, Michael Abel, Paul Ruppert, Yitao Wang, Ayesha Ghosh, Jacob Comerci, Michaela Friedberg, Taylor Cornelson, Laura Salazar
Book Design: Studio Lin

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Studio No. 3, With Large Roof

Canaan, New York, 2016–20

An oversized pitched roof. A hat with holes. A rock with a busy world underneath. Underneath a triangle, a 2 story studio for making art and taking photographs clad in corrugated metal. No attempts are made to hide the roof’s construction. Its eaves overhang. Its rafters are exposed. So are its beams. Square openings are cut into the roof, simply placed wherever felt right. They move. They drift. They frame views. Sometimes they open a gabled end to windows beyond. Sometimes they look like eyes. Other times they notch the roof eave  above a window to the stair or studio. And other times they fall across the roof’s pitch as large skylights. It’s made with affordable materials. The interior is basically three interconnected rooms. The plywood room is the most interior, for self-reflection perhaps, but they can be used for anything.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Michael Abel, Cyrus Dochow, Paul Ruppert, John Yurchyk

 

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And Benches, Platforms, Partitions, Shelving, Activity…

Book, 132 pages. New York: A/D/O. Including Enrique Ramirez, “You Are not Reading a History of The D/G/O (A Configurable Essay Related to MOS Installation No. 15).” 8" x 10".

An adult activity book, or a kids activity book.  Really, it could be for anyone interested in coloring and stickers. Includes a wonderfully strange text by Enrique Ramirez printed in stickers.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert, John Yurchyk, Michael Abel, Mark Acciari, Nile Greenberg, Fancheng Fei, Zosia Nowakowska
Graphic Design: Studio Lin

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Rock No. 1–12

We love rocks. They come in as many shapes, sizes, and textures as you can imagine. Smooth. Rough. Bumpy. Round. Striped. Spotted. Hard, usually. It varies. They sit and stare at us silently. We love them all. We love texture maps of rocks used in architectural renderings. We love texture maps and rocks. Many of these rocks are made from a coated tyvek paper, some are printed waterproof canvas with dye sublimation that can be used outdoors like real rocks, but lighter and softer.

“Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech,” Druker Design Gallery, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 22–March 11, 2018
Curators: Andrew Holder, K. Michael Hays

Solo Exhibition, Princeton University School of Architecture, Princeton, New Jersey, October 12–23, 2015

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Rubenstein Commons: The Usefulness of Useless Space

Book, 128 pages. New York: Artist book. 8.5" x 11”.

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School No. 2, IAS

Commons, Princeton, New Jersey, 2016

A new Commons for the Institute of Advanced Study. We don’t belong there, but maybe we could. The building is a walkway. A cloister in reverse. Focused outwards. A large ramp integrates the building into the sloping site. Circulation is inflated. More like a room than a hallway. A place to talk, to work, or to sit alone. Moving through the building is an opportunity for a new kind of interaction. A chance for people to talk. Hopefully. Sometimes people from different disciplines. A scientist and a musician. An architect and anyone else. Furniture helps. Mailboxes. Benches. Upstairs there are glazed rooms. They look out onto the campus path. Something more formal. A place to meet. To learn. To present research. Light wells are staggered across the building. There are 6. All square. Less formal than an institution might want. They are lighthouses. The whole thing is a factory. An inverted monastic typology. A place to wait for the campus shuttle. A place to park your bike. Views. Sounds. Activity. Equal parts chance and choreography.

Project Team: Hilary Sample, Michael Meredith, Mathew Staudt, John Yurchyk, Michael Abel, Mark Acciari, Phillip Denny, Andrew Frame, Paul Ruppert, Ivi Diamantopoulou

 

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Consultation No. 2, Kunsthaus Bregenz

Consultation for Rachel Rose

A project screen. A custom printed carpet. Gradients. A monolith. A chunky freestanding wall thats a diaphanous screen. The screens are all CNC knitted, like lace. An image with an image projected on top. Still and moving images collapsed together.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Michael Abel, Mark Acciari, Paul Ruppert, Zosia Nowakowska

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Installation No. 15, And Benches, Platforms, Partitions, Shelving, Activity Books, Uniforms, …

Brooklyn, New York, 2016

It all started with two aluminum elements, the “Horizontal” and the “Vertical.” The “Horizontal” is 100 inches long; the “Vertical” is 16-5/16 inches high. After countersinking 336 holes into the “Horizontal” and drilling 42 holes into the “Vertical,” they can attach together: “Verticals” to “Horizontals”; “Horizontals” to “Verticals”; “Verticals” to “Verticals”; and “Horizontals” to “Horizontals.” One “Horizontal” plus 3 “Verticals” make a single bench… But “Verticals” can become horizontal and “Horizontals” vertical. All of these are attached by “People,” and we’ve found that “People” don’t like to follow directions. They bend or break the rules. You can, for example, construct something with “Horizontals” and no “Verticals,” or vice versa. This logic of addition repeats until you simply run out of parts or money or both. Everything is aggregated, arranged, and rearranged by “People.” Everything is mirrored. Everything reflects everything else. “People” assemble and disassemble “Horizontals” and “Verticals” while wearing beautiful shimmering “Uniforms” – silver mylar, pleated-nylon coats full of pockets for storage – designed in collaboration with Slow and Steady Wins the Race.

These “Uniforms” store and conceal their tools. These “Uniforms” make the labor seem incredibly fun, which it is not. (It is slightly fun, if you’re into that sort of thing.) While working, “People” carry wonderful “Activity Books,” designed in collaboration with Studio Lin. These “Activity Books” inform and distract them from their work. But the “People” are a nomadic workforce. They don’t want to be doing this full-time. They want to be somewhere else. They want to be distracted… Each “Activity Book” has 100 configurations – and a lot of stickers – that document a small portion of configurations made from “Horizontals” and “Verticals”: a bus stop; park bench; bed; catwalk; partition; auditorium; riot barricade; pop-up shop; A.A. (architecture anonymous) meeting space; breakdancing stage; performance review niche; community theater; avant-garde coffee shop; phone booth; bedroom ensemble; bulk storage; secret society hangout; temporary museum; graphic designer support space; place to forget your wallet; gluten-free cooking arena; artisanal mugs craft fair; yet another makerspace; lecture hall; nondenominational chapel; pretentious market; design night school; global art fair; open-source archive; revolutionary activity organization… We cannot anticipate what will happen, or all the possibilities for A/D/O, itself a workspace, design school, retail outlet, gallery, restaurant, and many more things all at once. It is a platform. It is an ever-changing assembly like the installation itself. We don’t completely understand what it will become. What we do know is that the “Verticals” and “Horizontals” are bolted together with ¼”-20 flat-head screws.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk, Paul Ruppert, Michael Abel, Mark Acciari, Nile Greenberg, Fancheng Fei, Zosia Nowakowska
Uniforms in collaboration with Mary Ping Slow and Steady wins the Race

“Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech,” Druker Design Gallery, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 22–March 11, 2018
Curators: Andrew Holder, K. Michael Hays

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Installation No. 14, Selfie Curtain

Istanbul, Turkey, 2016

“Architects Draw People”

Ask anyone, “What do architects do?” and most reply, “Architects draw buildings.” They likely imagine a myopic figure, often dressed in black, huddled at her/his/their desk, obsessing over details. This image is not all wrong, but architects also draw, add, copy, or notate people to go along with everything we make. It is impossible to represent architecture without representing the human. Even when the human presence is intentionally left out or is reduced to a faceless set of measurements, it haunts architecture in its absence. As such, the point of this work, An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Scale Figures Without Architecture, is to collect various architects’ representations of life into a single document.

We began this project with no methodology other than casting a wide net, scouring both library and Internet to collect drawings by architects we knew to produce significant buildings and drawings or by those we simply thought of at the time. Then we deleted the architecture and context of these representations to focus specifically on the human(s) depicted by various architects or architecture offices. If we found nothing, we noted as much. While compiling all of these images, we were surprised to find that many architects simply do not represent people. Equally surprising, we found that architects who arguably have or claim nothing in common sometimes share an attitude towards scale figures (or a lack thereof). Perhaps their absence is evidence of desires for the so-called post-human; perhaps including people simply obscured representation of the architecture; or, perhaps the architects just didn’t get to it. Throughout the Encyclopedia one can find architects who: represent the human as inchoate scribbles; draw them by hand; exaggerate features; create a style; emphasize the geometric or mechanical aspects of bodies… And architects who: reference other scale figures; collage themselves as scale figures; make political statements; want to portray a mood or attitude; want to make scale figures as uninteresting as possible; show only backsides or only silhouettes; are eclectic; and so on. One can also see the relationship to media and technology through how architects represent people: in gaussy transparent Photoshop silhouettes; models collaged from lifestyle glossies and on-the-street fashion blogs; soft charcoal smudge-sketches; watercolors; full-color graphic illustrations; etc…. We tried to include broad examples but, when skimming the Encyclopedia, accept our apologies for those offices and buildings we have neglected to include. We did what we could to be as inclusive as possible within the relatively narrow medium of architectural publications. After all, the point was never to be completely totalizing – an impossibility, nowadays – but rather to be as broad as could be managed within our given resources… And we tried. We collected over 2,000 figures produced by over 200 architects, and presented every figure at the same scale (1″=1’–0″). Scale figures are a fundamental part of any professional architect’s arsenal; we have all amassed folders upon folders on our servers filled with these fictional people. And although scale figures are one of those things that most of us take for granted in day-to-day practice, they are no doubt a disciplinary problem, a fact which became increasingly evident as we assembled the Encyclopedia. It might seem naively absurd, but as we stared at the countless figures in this book, it became hard to see them as anything but a kind of global citizenry. They are Architecture’s refugees. They travel the world, popping up from time to time in various institutions and schools, at lectures, on reviews, and in student work. And the more we looked at them, the more we thought about both the architecture offices that created them and the wonderfully diverse world we all live in – a world which seems to be ever more intolerant of difference and increasingly inhuman.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Michael Abel, Jacob Comerci, Taylor Cornelson, Michaela Freidberg, Mark Acciari

“ARE WE HUMAN?” Istanbul Design Biennial, October 22–December 4, 2016. Reinstalled Princeton, New Jersey.
Curators: Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley

“Entourage,” MAK Center for Art and Architecture, West Hollywood, California, June 22–September 15, 2024
Curator: Jia Yi Gu

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Model Furniture No. 4, Shelving

A place to put things. Shelving offers walls a new utility. The shelf adapts to the wall. Shelving repeats. If you’re feeling bold. Endless. Made from parts. Infinite arrangements. Displaying display.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Andrew Frame, Michael Abel
Photographer: Michael Vahrenwald

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Housing No. 5, Rosseau Lake College

Rosseau, Ontario, Canada, Student and Faculty Housing, Proposal

Student and Faculty Housing. Built into the hillside. The roof follows a path. The roof is a path. Wrapping around the terrain. Picturesque. Informal. Elements protrude. Figures. Circles. Squares. Trees. Objects scattered. A shelter. Everything follows the landscape. A green roof, a visual extension of the ground, like a large contour model. Individual units are independent yet connected. Individuals create community. An assembly of parts. A place where you might gather. Or a place to be alone. Attentive. Bicycle paths zig zag across the hill. Stairs provide shortcuts. Snakes and Ladders. Embedded in nature. Trees grow through the building, through holes through the roof. The topography. Ambient. Radial. Natural, maybe. A part of the hill.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk, Michael Abel, Nile Greenberg, Paul Ruppert, Fancheng Fei, Zosia Nowakowska

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Model Furniture No. 2, Chair

A normal chair. We thought this might be the most normal chair.  At least, it’s normal to us. A seat for 1 person with a back and 4 legs. We see them everywhere. It’s totally nondescript. Easy. We wanted to see it in metal.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Andrew Frame, Michael Abel, Fancheng Fei
Photographer: Michael Vahrenwald

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Model Furniture No. 1, Cabinet

“Reproductions of Reproductions of Reproductions (or, Model Furniture).”

An obsession with the stuff that occupies the background of architectural representation, the stuff other than the architecture, the things we fill spaces with, led us to look at furniture made for architectural models. Think: close-ups of generic, nearly notational chairs; fields of wobbly stools with legs so slightly out of alignment; the most mundane shelving systems imaginable; abstracted blocks turned modular benches or cabinets or who-knows-whats; nondescript tables and displays; reproductions of reproductions of reproductions of mid-century modern chairs; indescribable things distorted by humidity; clumsy, ergonomic 2-D extrusions; tables with an impossible materiality; seats proportioned a little too high or low; an economy of pieces cut and pasted together; replicas of some other design; etc…. These miniature objects, made by armies of interns and careful craftspersons alike, populate models by architecture offices large and small. They’re a sort of low-resolution representational default, a reduction to the bare qualities of an object – handmade ready-mades. Works in the “Model Furniture” series are translations of these translations: from a table to a model to a table again, something that oscillates between /reality/reference/reality/. They are both something and not.

While working on this series we have collected a myriad photographs of model furniture into a single catalog, An Unfinished Catalog of Model Furniture Without Architecture. We have used various bad images as a starting point for translations of our own design in a new furniture series, titled “Model Furniture.”

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Andrew Frame
Photographer: Colin Todd, Lauren Coleman

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Exhibition Design No. 4, The Other Architect

New York, New York, 2016

23 case studies of architects who didn’t/don’t build. Something outside of design practice. A different mode. We were asked to display ephemera of many kinds. Drawings. Books. Letters. Photographs. Budgets. Tactics. Videos. Mission statements. Manifestos. Surveys. Posters. Meeting minutes. Organizational schemes. T-shirts. Questionnaire. Boats. Buses. We presented everything on a shelf or a table. Some things just couldn’t go on the wall. Leaning. Lying. Casual Placement. Temporary. We wanted people to read. To sit for an extended period of time. Like this was their office. Or perhaps they were the archivist themselves.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk
Structural Consultant: Zak Kostura, Arup
Graphic Design: COCCU Christian Lange
Photographer: James Ewing

Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia University, New York, New York, September 16–December 2, 2016
Curator: Giovanna Borasi

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Housing No. 4, A Situation Constructed from Loose and Overlapping Social and Architectural Aggregates

Detroit, Michigan, 2016

An urban proposal for Dequindre Cut. The structure is a city. Dense. Open. Something like a highway or parking garage. Recognizable. Familiar. But different. The scheme is a new typology. Not new maybe. Gardens and plazas extend across the roof. X’s and O’s are scattered. Like a tic-tac-toe board without a grid. No Jefferson. Informal. Economical yet dysfunctional. Thin buildings maximize light. Calculated without an algorithm, although we could. A loose arrangement of parts. A situation. Collectively owned. There are many paths. Multiple possibilities. Roofs. Ramps. Porches. Overhangs. A new urban fabric. A garden of construction. Objects gathered together forming something other than objects.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk, Andrew Frame, Mark Acciari, Phillip Denny, Paul Ruppert, Jason Bond, Steve Gertner, Mathew Staudt, Sarah Wagner, Fauzia Evanindya, Fancheng Fei, Jacob Comerci, Michaela Friedberg, Taylor Cornelson, Laura Salazar

US Pavilion, 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, May 28–November 27, 2016
“The Architectural Imagination,” Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), Detroit, Michigan, February 11–April 16, 2017
“The Architectural Imagination,” A+D Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles, California, July 14–November 5, 2017
Curators: Cynthia Davidson, Mónica Ponce de León

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MOS: Selected Works

Book, 288 pages. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 2016

“Preface,” by Hilary Sample

In this book, there are three types of projects: built, unbuilt, and in progress. These projects are reflective of the built and more permanent work from the office. In a way we are picking up where we left off from our previous book entitled Everything All at Once, The Videos, Software and Architecture of MOS. While we purposely decided to exclude permanent work from that volume, the projects shown here have been undertaken since the beginning of the office and by extension have also been designed under this condition of everything being done all at once (EAAO). In other words, while we have created two separate books, the ideas and work are not done separately from one another. However, architecture takes a long time to create, both in drawing and in building form, and, more importantly, in thinking through the problems of the contemporary. It is important to us that we see this work as a manifestation of a body of work.

Each project represents distinct forms of representations of architecture. As buildings that are permanent, fixed, and material, we have worked toward the making of a body of work that emphasizes form over shape, processes of form-finding focused on a certain set of problems, and work through archetypes as much as through vernacular typologies, representation, and media in response to the complexities of contemporary subjectivities. Architecture always deals in the paradox of making and unmaking in the world, which continually challenges us every day.

In working toward a particular aesthetic project, a kind of abstract version of architecture itself, we seek to define new limits for the discipline of architecture. Specifically, we are interested in creative ways of making new visual limits. Through this collapse of art and life into new working method drawings and buildings are two separate acts that each inform the other. We’ve actively worked toward an increasing abstraction of architecture. If technology has given to the profession the ability to make lifelike views, what it has not offered the discipline is a critical lens for understanding those images. Rather, we offer up a new form of visuals – each image is an independent art work that is a space of its own to experiment, to play, and to collapse art and life into one new image. But we are not building images as buildings – images are not buildings. They are a form of architecture, in a kind of expanded definition of what makes up the things that we do as architects – we could leave the drawing at black lines on a white background, but we are trying to elevate the importance of drawing.

Renewing our interest in drawing has been done in parallel to the work done through videos and softwares. Spending time in those spaces and virtual worlds has had a lasting impression. As environments they have been far more productive, stimulating, and both more finite and infinite. As architects, we are supposed to be empathic. Sitting behind a computer screen down in the trenches is physically wearing, but we have always felt uplifted through each drawing. For us, the drawings reveal the kind of work process that we, as architects, are engaged within a kind of day-in and day-out. The space in which we draw as architects and designers is polychromatic and flat, not black and white and not deep, although we can create perspectives. Our visual work on images is separate as a thing to be made from the making of the architectural working drawings, or models, or prototypes, etc., and is a creative way to work through aesthetic and formal problems. It is important to keep the representations and their multiple forms separate from the actual forms of drawing used to make buildings. That each drawing is a visual and creative act has become more important in the overall work.

In creating buildings, we have sought to engage histories of architecture, culture, and society. Mostly the work seeks a kind of hollowed-out space enclosed by envelopes that are performative, creating careful, framed views of nature and the surroundings, but also at times producing new types of spaces that are outside but covered. The architecture seeks a kind of relationship with architecture’s vernacular types – primarily the domestic and its elements-roof, porch, hearth, chimney, front window, etc. Materially we’ve experimented from thatch to zinc, working through performance in a serious way. While we are playful, we take our work and the subjects we engage seriously. At times there seems to be a misunderstanding that when we say “playful” we are too lighthearted. We have dealt with the real problems in dealing with the subject of technological performance in the way a house floats, or the orphanage’s construction methods in response to seismic issues, to the ways in which a conservatory can coexist within a living space, to a visitor’s center’s ability to operate on limited energy. These are matters that just should be a part of the building, and are critical to its function but does not need to be the focus of its description. Rather, we’re interested in ways we can continue to be alchemical and produce new subjectivities and audiences for architecture while, at the same time, being serious architects who create architecture that embodies an exemplary practice and poses new visual limits for the discipline.

Graphic Design: Neil Donnelly

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Maintenance Architecture

Book, 208 pages. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016

“Previously built architecture is a maintenance issue more than anything else.” – Gordon Matta-Clark1

Maintenance plays a crucial role in the production of architecture, yet by and large architects have treated it with indifference. Despite its existence everywhere, the history of maintenance has been neglected as part of the discourse from within architecture.2 Dismissed as irrelevant to form making and design, maintenance has been cast aside, appearing (if at all) in the back-section advertisements of architecture magazines or categorized as a problem to be undertaken after construction, not treated as a disciplinary concern or as having any relevance to the production of an art form.3 Perhaps this is because buildings deteriorate slowly and imperceptibly, but this disciplinary disaffection is undeserved. With the day-to-day wear and tear on surfaces, buildings eventually decay if left unkept. Labor is required through the form of maintenance to keep buildings looking new. But maintenance is more than labor; it is a result of work performed by architects in their making of buildings. Following the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s distinction between labor and work, looking at maintenance offers a new representation on work or a “lasting thing.”4 And now more than ever it is time to pay attention to it, as our contemporary architecture culture values images of those things that are new or appear to be new rather than lived in, and privileges a work of art in its original form. Understanding the complexities required for an image to endure is not abstract, and not about labor alone. While architecture has turned a blind eye to the subject of maintenance, others have made it the object of their work, primarily through art, revealing new realities and subjectivities that architecture should revisit.

By making maintenance the subject of their work, artists reveal that, in the postmodern split between art and life, maintenance was cast on the side of life and technology – within architecture, especially, forgotten and removed from primary imagery, and when it was introduced, rendered as a technical act performed without consequences for the creative act of design. Yet maintenance is needed if beauty is to endure. It is labor. But it can be argued that it both produces work and affects the production of work. This portrayal of maintenance emphasizes its routine qualities and the endless repetition of skilled labor it requires. Maintenance, unlike general cleaning, should not be categorized as part of what Arendt called “reproductive” labor – manual acts of unskilled labor.5 Maintenance should be understood as labor, but skilled labor, especially when it involves large-scale buildings like towers. Meanwhile, buildings require labor and work if they are to be considered imageworthy, a goal in which maintenance plays an inherent part. In modernism, architects thought through the problem of maintenance as part of the architecture, and the division between art and life did not yet exist. It is time to rethink the relevance of maintenance’s effects on contemporary architectural practice, image production, representation, and culture at large.

Artists, on the contrary, have continued to challenge our notions of endurance and permanence in response to modernism and neo-avantgarde approaches toward art and work. As early as the 1960s and 1970s, people like Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Gordon Matta-Clark brought issues of maintenance and spectacle to the fore in projects like, respectively, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” (1969) and Conical Intersect (1975). This book examines a range of art practices-historical and contemporary – in order to address the problem of maintenance from an architectural perspective, and speculates how expanded thinking on the subject could impact future design and discourse. When a careful look is taken at the intersection between art, architecture, and maintenance, the recursive problems of subjects and objects surface in interesting ways.

Maintenance originates as a modern concern, though unlike cleaning, its more domestic counterpart, it is not a “happening,” as in the kinds of spontaneous events the artist Allan Kaprow created. But contemporary artists have recast it as a “happening” through their works, repositioning the subject as “cool.” While maintenance is not the origin of architecture, in architecture it is possible to find an origin of maintenance. Thinking back to projects such as Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House (1929) or SOM’s Lever House (1952), it is clear that issues of upkeep at both the domestic and urban scales were coming to the fore by the mid-twentieth century. Maintenance as a subject aligns itself with philosopher Martin Heidegger’s reading of Dasein‘s experiences regarding tools, things of nature, and other human beings as being-in-the-world.6 Through a careful reading of archival building photographs and architectural drawings, maintenance’s history can be found.

Not until the early twentieth century did photography become a widely accepted mode of architectural representation in magazines, newspapers, books, and elsewhere. Photographs became the way to circulate images of buildings to wide audiences, while simultaneously bringing problems of iconography and imageability to the discipline. Maintenance is a subject that appears and reappears throughout modern and contemporary histories of architecture, but also in contemporary art. It is impossible to do without maintenance unless the desired outcome is decay or death. Through images of maintenance, both in architecture and in art, it is possible to see the various roles that it plays.

This book is primarily concerned with a few specific types of buildings – the private house, pavilions, and high-rise buildings – and, because of the significance of images in the modern period, it pays particular attention to buildings constructed with novel and developing materials, technologies, and precise detailing. This includes modern buildings like Lever House (1952) and the U.S. Steel Building (1971), and contemporary buildings like the Beijing Water Cube (2008) and the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2004). The architects Alison and Peter Smithson present an imperative to assess this kind of work in their “Prelude” to The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture:

One further thought. No one has properly observed a quite definite special sub-category of modern architecture. An architecture of the enjoyment of luxury materials, of the well-made, of the high finish. It is special to Mies and occasional to Le Corbusier and Gropius.7

Taking the Smithsons’ prompt, Maintenance Architecture examines buildings in this special subcategory, citing a range of modern and contemporary works that take on maintenance as a subject without “one-thingly character.”8 Maintenance is deeply connected to issues of imageability and architecture’s present-day concerns. It is more than a problem of trying to be or appear eternally new. Maintenance presents evidence of nature, evidence of human relationships beyond the technical.9

The evolution of building construction methods, in conjunction with the increasing prevalence of architectural photography, began to produce a kind of architecture that based its worth on spectacle and iconicity over a lived experience. Today we cannot separate this kind of performance from other things. The significant things are those that are “close to us,” as Heidegger once said about airplanes and radio sets; the things that are close to us through technology, ultimately, are about the essence of an epoch, but simultaneously also bring us close to one another, physically or through information.10 For modern architecture, the photographs that captured the buildings in a certain state – that of newness or appearing new – kept the discipline close. But further following this thought, and looking more inward, maintenance is really the thing that brings us close and keeps us close. Its effect of continual newness contributed to a new representation: the photograph.

While the repetition of carefully selected images printed in black and white perpetuated the mythos of modern architecture, the expression of architecture through multiple media and modes of representation is necessary for contemporary projects. Ezra Stoller, the famous photographer whose photographs captured the modern moment, literally rendering the time period, was part of a bygone age; the fixed and singular image is no longer the only thing available, because of the proliferation of media today. These images no longer stand alone, but are instead viewed in the context of other images propped up against other forms of media from videos to blogs, Flickr streams, Instagram feeds, and so on. Architecture that bases its worth on the creation of iconicity and spectacle assumes it will endure in part because it is captured and archived online, instantly and forever available. Recently, the rapid and unprecedented growth primarily in the Middle East and Asia has likewise produced an image culture that is varied yet abundant. While it may be unrealistic to think of limiting a building through a singular or select set of discrete image(s), the way that an image or set of images endures has new meaning in today’s endless yet fleeting image culture; this is especially true for buildings that are public and urban.

The recent diversity of architectural works, styles, and ideologies has produced a crisis in the assessment of work and images. Without unifying evaluation criteria across the discipline, we have returned to a focus on performance, examining architecture through the lens of its built life. This is by no means a new concern – we need only remember the American oil crisis of the 1970s, the creation of Paper Architecture, and the beginnings of postmodernism to pull the discipline away from performance into “real architecture.” The focus on issues around technology and sustainability is reemerging as a way to think about architecture, but it only exacerbates the split between life and art. This way of thinking is an extension from the late 1990s and early 2000s building boom where realism became subsumed across the disciplines of architecture and art. In many ways architecture during this period leaned heavily on advances in allied fields like structural and climate engineering. Architecture could be advanced only by enveloping other disciplines, and in this moment those particular disciplines were largely based in technology.

Maintenance carries the expression of architecture’s essence and represents it as a forward-thinking practice (or not). If maintenance can formulate a line of questioning in the Heideggerian sense of a “question builds a way” and “the way is one of thinking”11 – then through maintenance it is possible to see a dialectical relationship with architecture. For instance, the Seattle Public Library, one of the most celebrated buildings of the early twenty-first century, advances the discipline through its form and function, and also through technology. But does it advance beyond its technological bounds? The building is cleaned by the most basic and dangerous method: a cleaner on a rope. The use of the squeegee here creates an unmediated relationship between humans and the architecture – bringing the building closer to problems of handicraft. This is a strange way to read a building, with its advanced diagrid facade that collapses structure and enclosure into one system. There is a glamour of the uncelebratory overlaid onto the celebratory, but perhaps there was no other way to solve the problem of cleaning, and the theatrical stunts of the window washer set against the backdrop of the building add to the recursive story of the building, even if it is absurd. We may never know.

Within contemporary architectural discourse, maintenance remains insufficiently defined, except in specialized and technical contexts. Rarely thought of in social or design terms, maintenance has been more readily explored and experimented with in allied disciplines like preservation, material science, development, policy, insurance laws, and building codes. Even as new forms of practice and built work begin to question the limits of its more standard interpretations, the concept of maintenance has not evolved much in recent years.

Furthermore, an important distinction should be made between cleaning and maintenance. The two are frequently misinterpreted: often maintenance is interpreted as cleaning. But cleaning is more generally associated with domestic, and therefore private and individual, activities: dusting, polishing, or vacuuming. Maintenance instead requires formal organization and teams of skilled workers, operating in public. Where cleaning engages the discrete parts of a building, maintenance is dedicated to safeguarding the holistic image of an architectural work. Each has a unique temporal quality as well. Cleaning is concerned with a building’s use at a particular moment; maintenance represents an investment in the persistence of architecture – both as an image and as an ideal.

Maintenance will become increasingly important as architects adopt practices that are to affect environmental performance and also the making of environments.12 In modernism, architects presented the building cycle with falsely constrained endpoints – conception and realization – that hinged on the parallel production of idealized images.

These pivotal points have cultivated a narrow understanding of architectural reality, often omitting the life of the building and its performance. An expanded building cycle that incorporates maintenance has the potential to affect the future of architecture by contributing to the cycle of creation, building, occupancy, the representation of architecture, and image circulation, which in turn will impact future invention.

Contemporary artists have pursued the subject of maintenance perhaps more than architects, for whom it is really the most pressing. The artists discussed in this book are often active participants in their work, performing cleaning tasks almost always staged within celebrated works of architecture. Artists choreograph scenes that disrupt iconic images of architecture in order to reveal the tasks of cleaning. In some cases – as with Job Koelewijn’s Cleaning the Rietveld Pavilion (1992) or Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Le Baiser/The Kiss (1999) – there is a kind of overperformance for effect, where the artists implement tools and dress associated with a kind of industrial cleaning in excess of both their task and the architecture being cleaned. In so doing they call into question something more than just cleaning. Their works deal with the representation of architecture and with labor that is robust, organized, social, and temporal.

Art practices also reveal technology, and have specifically illuminated the relationship between architecture and the maintenance workers who bring buildings to the forefront of our consciousness through their repetitive labor. Here we can turn to the window washer who exerts forceful energy across a building’s face. There is a particular beauty in the striking contrast of the image of the maintenance worker floating in front of a glass curtain wall. The scale of the body against an unrelenting grid has a diminishing effect on the body, but the beauty of the architecture is also disrupted by the image of the worker, reminding one that architecture is not complete. Maintenance in all its clumsy, barebones mechanics is an act of renewal or rebirth, even though it has primarily been thought of as a technical act of repair. In Morning Cleaning, for example, Jeff Wall broaches two paradoxical aspects, the everyday and the modern, by staging the event of cleaning. And while the everyday reenacted here is neither flat nor deadpan, it constructs a world that is never revealed.13

In architecture culture, maintenance can be understood through two concepts that have been circulating of late: performance and post-occupancy. Post-occupancy is a relatively new term that has been adopted into architectural discourse as a means of reconciling the recent and all-too-consuming movement toward realism. Coined to describe the period after a building has been completed, when it has begun to be inhabited, the term places importance on the life of a building rather than on the ideas surrounding its form making. Post-occupancy plays off the professional definition of occupancy, which describes the number of building users and the building’s occupancy type, such as assembly, office, residential, and so on.

Unlike building or design codes, post-occupancy offers calculable elements of knowledge – information or data such as natural elements from temperature to rainfall, or performance-based criteria such as specifications that can be used for evaluation and feedback. It is important to note, however, that these terms should be understood beyond the purely technological – they cannot be separated out from the social or cultural. In a period of tremendous production of the real, it makes sense that there would also be an abundant effort to absorb built work and its effect on discourse. It remains to be seen whether post-occupancy can create a new paradigm for evaluating architecture or effectively support the existing significance attached to form making. Post-occupancy seems to emerge on the side of the owner, the user, the inhabitant, or the specialist, and less so of the design architect, and so there is the danger of it only further fragmenting the discipline. Where post-occupancy takes root is up for grabs; but if it is rethought, it can be a place for new ideas and will deeply affect allied practices in addition to architecture itself.

Interest in preservation and in post-occupancy has come to the forefront over the last two decades, in parallel to the building boom or in spite of it. Most recently, these two subjects were explored through two architecture venues, one an exhibition and the other a book. At the 2010 Venice Biennale, director Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA asked exhibitors to consider the interaction between architecture and its occupants under the title “People meet in architecture.” In presenting an entirely new body of work on this topic, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas with OMA/AMO curated the exhibition Cronocaos, arguing that their work had always been concerned with time and history: “OMA and AMO have been obsessed, from the beginning, with the past.”14 This exhibition presented a select group of materials that became an archive of “fragments” of the total collection of buildings in a range of mediums, from photographs to a series of graphic posters with quotes, charts, and statistics on the subject of preservation; “project cards” made to look like postcards could be torn off a wall and taken with the viewer. The cards featured projects from OMA, including the Maison à Bordeaux, the overscaled fluorescent orange bean bag from the Maison à Bordeaux that was part of another exhibition, Content, and oversized photo albums. The posters were used as a place to locate specific quotes on theories about architecture’s endurance from critical figures like Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc. On one exhibition poster, featuring an image of Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc alongside each other, Ruskin is saying: “Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter; it is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture”; while Viollet-le-Duc declares: “To restore a building is not to repair it, nor to do maintenance, nor to rebuild it, it is to reestablish it in an ultimate state that never existed before.” The exhibition announced: “The interval between the now and the preserved is shrinking, and is about to disappear. From this moment, we do not only have to look back, but also forward; we will have to decide what to preserve in advance.”15 This statement underscores the compression of time between a building’s completion and its canonization. To designate a work of architecture a “historic monument” amplifies the burden of care, and raises questions not only around restoration or preservation but also those critical to creative making. Furthermore, deciding “what to preserve in advance” means reclaiming an aspect of the discipline that has been parceled out to specialists and historians. It urges architects to address preservation before a project is realized, and this includes the subject of maintenance, which is new territory in that it has not yet been theorized and the consequences are unknown. And while maintenance may seem like a separate act, not part of the discipline or discourse of architecture, I would argue that there are subtle shifts and slight visual adjustments that are made as a result of maintenance. As buildings go from daily maintenance to large-scale interventions such as labor done for preservation or restoration, I would still argue that all three things effectively change their appearance. Maintenance performed on a building before it becomes a monument is fundamentally different from when it is performed afterward. Inevitably, there will be codes, practices, and strategies to be put in place when we are trying to uphold a new yet re-created image of the building. If “preservation is overtaking us,” maintenance was there first.16 Preservation is in a way a singular act; maintenance is ongoing. In philosophy, endurance is questioned through a series of acts in looking: for instance, if something passes between an object and a viewer, is it still the same object? If the answer is no, if that object is indeed something other than the original, then this logic could be extended to acts performed on buildings, such as maintenance. In this way, it can be argued that even though the act of maintenance may not leave a trace, it fundamentally changes the image of a building, the image of its architecture. This may not seem particularly significant, but it can open up a new way of thinking whereby architecture is not fixed once a building is complete. Architecture is almost never new and, even more important, its aim should not be to remain new, singular, or fixed. In Post-Occupancy (a “special issue” of Domus, entrusted to an editor-architect of worldwide renown who illustrates architecture according to his own original codes of communication), Koolhaas presents four projects: the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin, Seattle Central Library, McCormick-Tribune Campus Center at IIT, and Casa da Música. These works, he writes, “represent the realities we were complicit in creating, post-occupancy, as facts, not feats.”17 But these facts are still feats, particularly when they come up against the subject of time.

Maintenance is a reaction to and a momentary covering up of time’s terror.18 Manglano-Ovalle is captured through upclose stills from his film Le Baiser/The Kiss, dressed in his orange janitor suit, intently cleaning the glass façade of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House. His pleasure in cleaning is intimately portrayed, perhaps as an attempt to return the house to a place that has been refreshed and reflects the original – “an action for a certain sense of responsibility” – and to avoid “empirical mediocrity.”19

Maintenance occupies a particular space and moment in the life of a building. It comes after design, after construction drawings – those documents that record the future realities of the project – but exists after building, between acts of building and preservation, and again after preservation or restoration. It would be, in a way, what Jacques Derrida speaks of as “operating in silence, it never leaves any archive of its own.”20 It is only through art that maintenance gets recorded and archived, even if those records are fake, staged fictions. If architecture has had a disciplinary amnesia about maintenance, it was the art world that created “the possibility of memorization of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression.” And to further this, Derrida goes on to say, “we also must remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death drive. And thus from destruction.”21 Architecture and architects have typically been figures of completion: completing the model, the design, the details, the job site inspection. Maintenance somewhat undoes this completion, requiring us (architects) to be vulnerable and in need of community.22 If, as Karsten Harries suggests, “What weighs on us is not so much that we are powerless, but that we repress that powerlessness and the associated emotions . . . hard to accept our temporality,”23 and “The historical dimensions of our environment must be preserved and represented if we are to keep open the possibility of genuine dwelling. And we do not preserve or represent history by just playing with its fragments,”24 I would then argue that sometimes it is only by looking through fragments that a clearer picture of what has occurred can be revealed. Maintenance offers a way of looking at the world, and artists who incorporate maintenance in their work are, in effect, re-presenting architecture back to us.

Each generation draws its own parameters around the discipline: sometimes the role of the architect stops at the idea, sometimes at the drawing, and sometimes at the built work. Each building process requires a unique approach, depending on which aspect the owner, architect, or society prioritizes above all the others: the concept or intent, the construction documents, the physical building, or its reproducible image. It remains to be seen whether architects will choose to stay involved in the constructed lives of their designs, and whether that involvement is even desirable. But one thing that seems to continually be at the core of architecture is its representation.

“Post-occupancy” offers a way to see what happens in the absence of the author; as Koolhaas suggests, maintenance is one component of post-occupancy. Its representation calls into question the very nature of architecture, since the imagery of maintenance, at first blush seeming only technical, would have nothing to do with beauty.25 The performative aspects of architecture remain repressed; instead, architecture constructs value through idealized representation in publications. Reflecting on architecture in The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture (1995), the Smithsons write that the purpose of their book was an exercise in gathering images that meant the most to them personally. This collection, when put together and ordered, made – in their words a “work-document” that presented photographs and drawings of buildings which constituted a “harmonious whole.” The book’s mission was to focus on the way modern architecture had been represented through images of completed buildings. The series of black-and-white images collected enabled them to offer a synopsis of the period: “this is probably the last collection of its kind. The next collection in forty years’ time of the architecture of our own period will be quite different for it will not record buildings,’ but built-places, and the documents will be mostly air views, sequential photographs, and system explanations.”26 They conclude (as quoted above): “No one has properly observed a quite definite special sub-category of modern architecture. An architecture of the enjoyment of luxury materials, of the well-made, of the high finish. It is special to Mies and occasional to Le Corbusier and Gropius.” In the materials and details of Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, Tugendhat house, and in the Krefeld houses, they find a “shameless bankers’ luxuriousness.”27 What in the end, perhaps, the architects realized in their search and curation, and also through their own work, is that there are hidden contingencies yet to be understood by modern architecture. This realization suggests that architectural representation is not just caught up in a particular building, but is indicative of a movement.

While maintenance may initially appear less fundamental to architecture than geometry or other cultural signifiers, it is inextricably tied to the life of buildings. To establish a discourse on maintenance requires us to rethink its associated terms like cleaning and preservation which, while seemingly banal or misunderstood, have far-reaching implications for the conception, construction, and endurance of buildings and of architecture itself. To use them interchangeably ignores their unique protocols that underscore their social, cultural, environmental, and economic differences. Observations like these aim to affirm the visionary potential of architecture while debunking the imagined reality we attribute to great buildings. An essential aspect of this investigation concerns the labor and efforts necessary to ensure architecture’s enduring image. The photographs in this book span the modern and contemporary periods, yet over this long time frame there has been little change in the thinking about endurance, luxury, and the image of architecture with respect to maintenance.

The series of images and short texts included in this book attempt to unpack the history of maintenance in order to understand and uncover its underlying motivations and narratives, as well as alternative models. of architecture. The texts are divided into five parts – “Maintenance and the Urban Image,” “Cleaning and the Politics of Labor,” “Visualizing Decay,” “Modernizing Maintenance,” and “Post-Occupancy and Alternate Architectural Futures” – with specific buildings, art projects, materials, products, and thematic reflections organized to illustrate each part.

These parts are divided not by type but, rather, by important thematics that run throughout the book. “Maintenance and the Urban Image” deals primarily with the iconography of skyscrapers in the context of the city, in order to set the stage for the relationship between image maintenance and building maintenance that is present throughout. “Cleaning and the Politics of Labor” investigates the differences between public and private maintenance through the lens of those respective workforces. “Visualizing Decay” is the one section exclusively devoted to art practices, illustrating the range of ways artists make issues of maintenance visible. “Modernizing Maintenance” deals with the influx of technology and devices developed to reduce labor, while “Post-Occupancy and Alternate Architectural Futures” looks to a variety of contemporary architectural projects and preservation techniques that deal with the afterlife of buildings in interesting and creative ways. Each part begins with a short paragraph and a project that seems emblematic of the section as a whole. The subsequent short texts address more specific concerns. The result is a collection of small fragments strung together in a larger narrative about how to draw attention to the relationship between architecture and maintenance through an investigation of allied fields.

This book was written as a reflection on the contemporary intersections between architecture, art, and culture. We have just emerged from a period of extensive construction, the building up of cities through important and monumental works of architecture, in some cases undertaken without a totalizing image and in other cases unplanned, even excessive. That is to say: in the rush to build, to make new world(s), there has been little consideration for the unmaking – those things that cause wear and tear on the building, from use to weather, and so on.

In the following instances it seems clear that maintenance has been a subject of some interest, but as time passes it will increasingly become an issue for cities in the future, much as it will be for the individual and for society. Maintenance is much more than a metaphor for rethinking culture and society; it exposes a range of imperfections, from unmaking – the decay of buildings, failing joints or chipped glass – to social inequities and unjust labor practices, and to tangible acts that lead to novel design thinking, formal invention, and unprecedented detailing. Even if they are just fragmentary moments, each of these qualities is integral to the underpinning of architecture. This book should be read as a collection of equal images: every image is of equal value. It offers a sort of archive, a curation, a permeable collection that recasts one story about architecture. It is not final; it can be added to or expanded. It is my hope that for someone who reads this book and looks at its images, it will be impossible ever to think about maintenance with indifference, but imperative to recognize that architecture is constructed of several facets, including social facets, one of which is maintenance; and that maintenance can affect design and the creative process.

Notes

1 Interview with Donald Wall (1975), Canadian Centre for Architecture Archives.

2 Hilary Sample, “Maintenance Architecture,” Praxis 6 (2004): 114–121.

3 Ibid.

4 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 2nd edn.

5 Pier Vittorio Aureli, conference introduction, “Architecture and Labor,” a symposium organized by Aureli and the PhD program “City/Architecture,” Architectural Association, London, November 13, 2015, <http://www.aaschool. ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=3256> (accessed March 1, 2015); Arendt, The Human Condition.

6 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 141.

7 Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, “Prelude” to The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 5. The Smithsons wrote the “Prelude” in 1965, but their book was not published until 1981.

8 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 147.

9 Ibid., 146.

10 Ibid., 147.

11 Ibid., 311.

12 David Gissen, Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 18–19.

13 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), 70.

14 Rem Koolhaas, “Cronocaos,” Log 21 (Winter 2011): 119.

15 Esther da Costa Meyer, review of Cronocaos, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 71, no. 2 (June 2012), 248–49. Meyer notes that “Cronocaos also perpetuates stereotypes concerning gender.”

16 See Rem Koolhaas with Jorge Pailos-Otero, Preservation Is Overtaking Us (New York: GSAPP Books, 2014).

17 Rem Koolhaas, “Preface,” in AMO/Rem Koolhaas, eds., Domus d’Autore, Post Occupancy (Domus, 2006).

18 Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 255.

19 Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 132–133.

20 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 78.

21 Ibid.

22 Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, 264.

23 Ibid., 261.

24 Ibid., 256.

25 Ibid.,119.

26 Smithson and Smithson, The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture, 5.

27 Ibid.

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Consultation No. 1, MET Roof Garden

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, 2015

Pierre Huyghe. Worked with him before. We like to have things grow unexpectedly. A weed grows out of a crack in the floor. A floor grows out of itself. Something off, unfinished. A state of decay or building, we’re not sure.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ivi Diamantopoulou, John Yurchyk
Structural Engineer: Robert Silman Associates
MEP Engineer: ACM Consulting
Photographer: Michael Vahrenwald

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The Indifferent Courier

Video 14:41

The inside,
not outside,
is where the person lives.
Person. Singular.
Many persons.
People.
Two individual people
planimetrically linked by a series of passageways.
The passageways, not vestibules,
are corridors.
Six corridors
linking the functions required by two people for living inside.
Inside, functions for living require space.
Living functions use space from the outside for the inside.
Two people require space for movement.
Movement in space requires a passageway.
Passageways enable connections.
These passageways, not porticos…
are couriers.
The house is an indifferent courier of passages.

Passage requires corridors.
Corridors require entrances.
Corridors require exits.
Two people living inside and outside of corridors.
Moving
resting
and functioning.
One standing.
One sitting.
One person stands on the interior looking at the other person functioning
sitting interiorly looking exteriorly.
Looking outside, the other person is processing the functions required for the day.
Two functioning people begin the day by dressing themselves.
The lower portion of one person requires long, thick cotton socks inside two hard leather shoes.
The other person brought the hard leather shoes interiorly from the exterior for the person to walk.
The other person likes how the hard leather looks.
The person likes how the leather smells on the outside of the shoes.
Leather comes from the skin of cows which graze exteriorly, harvested interiorly
to put a skin on the exterior of the shoes for the person to walk outside.
They need pants.
Inside the pants are briefs, the elastic waistband just below the navel.
Cotton grows exteriorly and is brought to the interior.
A person cannot walk beyond the interior without two pairs, one short, one long, of cotton pants.
One pair of short, thin cotton pants beneath one pair of long, dense cotton trousers.
For the upper portion, one thin cotton shirt with cold metal buttons.
The person leaves the right half and the left half of the shirt secured with the metal buttons and slips it over the head.
This saves time required for the day’s functions.
They tuck the bottom portion of the shirt into the trousers above the elastic waistband of the pants, taking care so as to not explode the abdomen.
Now dressed, the person looks at the other person.
The other person is nearly ready.
On the interior of two thin plastic shoes, are two long silk stockings.
The person brought the plastic shoes from the exterior to the interior for the other person to walk externally.
The person likes how the shoes make the legs look slender.
To walk in the shoes brings the person discomfort.
They do not like to walk with the shoes the other person brought to the interior.
One pair, thin silk pants, one short leather skirt with a cold metal zipper.
The person does not move the cold metal zipper as they slip the legs into the leather skirt.
The leather obstructs the metal zipper from sealing properly, stealing time which is required for the functioning of the day.
For the upper portion
one dense silk brassiere on the interior
one thin silk shirt on the exterior.
There are no buttons on the silk shirt.
The person, now dressed, looks exteriorly, thinking of the functions required for the day.
Two people functioning during the day require nourishment.
Nourishment takes energy from the exterior and uses it interiorly.
Exteriorly, there is nourishment; interiorly: the meal.
One person and the other person sit on the warm chairs beside the cold table on the interior of the warm corridor made of cold marble
eating the nourishment required for the functioning of the day.
On the table is a small warm bowl.
The person dips the wet spoon into the warm bowl.
The other person looks at the person.
The other person does not like the taste.
The other person places the spoon on the interior of the bowl, slowly stirring the nourishment.
The other person is pleased with the meal.
The other person brings the hot nourishment on the cold metal spoon to their lips.
The lips are connected to their mouth.
The spoon is connected to their hand.
The person looks at the other person eating, spilling a spoonful of nourishment.
The spill requires one cotton napkin.
A finger.
The soft back of one finger is a good substitute in the absence of a cotton napkin.
Now they stop.
It is no longer time for nourishment.
There is little time left in the day.
Where has the day gone?
The day usually requires work.
The day is measured in hours.
Hours are measured in minutes.
How many hours left in the day?
How many minutes?
Eight hours of work each day is required for the functioning of the week.
No work today.
Time is measured in weeks and the week in days and the day in hours.
Today is the end of the week.
No work today.
Today it is the weekend.
The week ends today.
Eight hours of work each day, but not today.
Today’s functions require relaxation.
Eight full hours of work each day, one full day of relaxation, for one functioning week.
They relax outside, collecting pieces, things, items for the inside.
Outside there are things. Many things.
Things to be brought inside.
There’s one now.
It glimmers in the light.The person squats real low, resting on their feet, buttocks below the knee, sitting on the heels.
The other person looks on.
Their body does not move like that.
How does the other person’s body move like that?
The person inside is watching, thinking, tallying the movements of the person outside.
Outside, they sift through the rubbish.
They collect.
Outside there are an endless collection of insides.
One person thinks it is a ruin.
The other person thinks it is a cornucopia.
Each piece is studied, scrutinized; does it belong inside?
Should it remain outside?
Moving from place to place, the person outside looks
studies
gathers
imagines
thinking of the things to be collected.
Photographing, documenting and representing each piece, the person imagines how it might look inside.
They send their photographs from outside to other insides
somewhere far away and very close simultaneously.
All pieces must be represented.
The person shuffles the outside pieces inside to the other who supervises the functions of the outside from the inside.
Outside the person is thinking of the pieces, being watched by the person inside
looking at their brightly lit screen with images of the objects from the outside, imagining what it would look like inside.
The person is not sure if they have any opinion on the matter.
Often the objects have specific qualities.
Little tiny pieces
remnants
memories
Each containing fragments of the outside.
Now they sit at opposite ends of the table, legs crossed in the chairs, the pieces of outside laid upon the table.
Piece by piece. One after another. The person shifts a piece.
The other person shifts it back, almost exactly.
Over, and over again.
Calculated.
Measured.
But now they stop.
Is this work?
Something else?
What does it mean?
Why do they gather things?
Why do they represent them?
They are no longer feeling relaxed.
It feels like too much, and almost nothing.
The day is almost over.
The birds outside have stopped singing.
The person relaxes on the interior inside the bath.
The other relaxes on the chair through the corridor watching the person relaxing.
The bath is made of cold marble, inside is hot water.
The person relaxes.
Exterior skin is refreshed from the hot water.
They see a tree.
On that tree is a nest.
Inside that nest is a bird.
The person is thinking.
What are they thinking?
What does the person think?
The person wonders where the day has gone.
The person wonders what the next day will bring.
The person sits looking outside at the bird, being watched by the other person inside on the chair.
The two people are connected together.
They are connected by the things they have collected.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ryan Barney, Mark Acciari

Solo Exhibition, Princeton University School of Architecture, Princeton, New Jersey, October 12–23, 2015

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House No. 11, Corridor House

Chicago, Illinois, 2011

At some point, before Twitter, the corridor killed a certain type of architecture. Courtyards collapsed into light wells; diagrams became buildings. It was all transit, all the time. Architecture became about the circulation of things, people, air, light, goods, _____, etc.… Space became a lubricant. It was almost spiritual. Architecture embraced this new efficiency, the short circuit, a faster way of getting from one place to another. As space was replaced with movement, stuff was jettisoned, the leftovers piled up. Nowadays, corridors are an afterthought, an indifferent chasm joining this to that in houses all across everywhere. This house occupies that circuitry. It’s one variation of many, an assembly of parts that are both technical and archetypal. Each module approximates the dimensions of a standard corridor and a 5’ x 10’ sheet of plywood. But in many cases the space of our contemporary corridors is big enough to inhabit, to fit a bed, desk, chair, stuff, like a clogged toilet. One after another, each module is positioned orthogonally. The exhausted, broken pediment has been copied and pasted without end. It’s illegible. The overall configuration is loosely organized around a collection of exterior spaces, but it’s disassociated from its ground. It’s repetitive. It’s made of parts. It’s casual. It’s banal. It’s almost familiar. It’s nothing in particular. It fits on a truck.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk, Cyrus Dochow, Mark Acciari, Michael Abel, Ryan Barney, Phi Van Phan
Fabrication: Remont Construction
Structural Engineer: Robert Silman Associates
Design Objects: Chamber/Juan García Mosqueda

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Life as We Know It

Book, 230 pgs. 4.25" x 6.875"

Strangely Comfortable Goateed Man Three, Apologized Nervously, American Humans, Wise Old Fish, Faceless Postal Worker, Door to Door Salesman 72, Oddly Extended 012.

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“Screenshots, Videos, Photographs, Mugs, …”

Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2015

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk, Michael Abel

Solo Exhibition, Liberty Gallery, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, November 13–20, 2015

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A hole No. thing

Video 12:23

Walking
Walking
Looking
Watching
In and around
Following directions
There, I see
I know that
And that
And there, another
My device tells me
It functions by directing my movements
It is difficult to understand how it works

It was not always like this
We are confronted with things when they break down
The architecture is broken
The night is dark
Very much like the night before this
And the one before that
The nights repeat more than the days
Used to be able to tell them apart, now we can’t be sure
Slightly different
Generally the same
Different sameness
I’ve been lost here before
My device notifies me
This was the way
Now is the way
It is precise
It has glitches
The process of decay is the process of crystallization
In the day this looks the same but different
I much prefer here to being there
She stopped and described a dream
He repeated it
Woman on a Bicycle, Wearing a Fur Coat –
Drinking Non-Fat Caramel Macchiato –
Extra Whip
Everything was the familiar but not
Somehow it goes together
She has the same device I have
That question regarding technicity
Where you begin determines where you end
Everything was covered in the Agreement
Technology determines the history of art
Systematic
Sequential
My device takes pictures
An emptiness that has to be filled up with production
Endlessly order and rearrange
Construct and fill up space through aimless activity
Starting, repeating it differently
We departed from an unknown origin
Completely unoriginal
It demanded attention
We produced the phenomenon of distance
Art produces new forms of distance
New forms of indifference
My device is in the background
It tells me where to go
It calculates and studies degradation
We are still lost although it is technically impossible
We communicate
My device anticipates my words
It is an almost familiar language without signs or symbols
No flourishes
No allusions
Not simplistic
Concise
Watching
Walking

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ryan Barney, Mark Acciari

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House No. 10, With Courtyard

Location Withheld at Request, 2015-19

There are many ways to describe the house. Through its parts: 5 Volumes; 1 Courtyard; 3 Beds (could be 2, could be 1); 1 shower; 6 entryways; 14 windows; 21 doors… Through metaphor: the house is a person reaching into the landscape or waving to a Google Earth satellite. Through formal organization: the 3-bedroom house is an informal aggregation of 5 house-shaped extrusions, with a square courtyard volume subtracted at its center. Through personal narrative: The house is shared within a family, multiple generations, multiple family members. There are children. There are pets. The family loves to be outside. They love to garden. They keep their most precious herbs in the courtyard. At night, Sam watches Mom pick mint for tea through the courtyard’s large glass windows. Dad falls asleep in an uncomfortable wicker chair in what looks like a hallway, but is actually his favorite place to read. Charlie sits alone in his room, out of sight, looking into the endless woods through large sliding doors, wondering what might be lurking in the forest beyond. Through verbs: the house is flattened, a splat, a splatter. Or through the iPhone note one of the architects first wrote on their phone before screenshotting it and sending it to their partner at 6:45 AM: There is no master bedroom, no his and hers sinks, no living room, no dining room, no rooms, no garage. There are many fronts; you can walk inside to outside to inside and out again. It is both looking inward at the garden court and outward at its surroundings. Things are incomplete, barely held together. Things happen in the spaces between other spaces. Hallways and corridors are places to rest for a little while.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Stefan Klecheski, John Yurchyk, Ivi Diamantopolou, Michael Abel, Paul Ruppert

“Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech,” Druker Design Gallery, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 22–March 11, 2018
Curators: Andrew Holder, K. Michael Hays

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Exhibition Design No. 3, The Other Architect

Montréal, Québec, 2016

23 case studies of architects who didn’t/don’t build. Something outside of design practice. A different mode. We were asked to display ephemera of many kinds. Drawings. Books. Letters. Photographs. Budgets. Tactics. Videos. Mission statements. Manifestos. Surveys. Posters. Meeting minutes. Organizational schemes. T-shirts. Questionnaire. Boats. Buses. We presented everything on a shelf or a table. Some things just couldn’t go on the wall. Leaning. Lying. Casual Placement. Temporary. We wanted people to read. To sit for an extended period of time. Like this was their office. Or perhaps they were the archivist themselves.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk, Michael Abel, Cyrus Dochow
Structural Consultant: Zak Kostura, Arup
Graphic Design: COCCU Christian Lange
Photographer: Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal

Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, Québec, October 28, 2015–April 10, 2016
Curator: Giovanna Borasi

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Object No. 10, Four-legged Stool

4 very very large cedar legs make a stool. The maximum we could put on our lathe.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample

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Mixed Use No. 3, Housing and Art Foundation

Seattle, Washington, 2014

A lot of things. Library, gallery, exhibition space, restaurant retail space, roof garden, artist-residency, affordable housing. A catch all. The building is made from brick. It matches its surroundings. Other industrial brick warehouses mostly. Oversized windows cover the facade. Jittery. Awkward. They’re deep to create shade. More efficient than its historic neighbors. But like a warehouse, there is programmatic flexibility. Light, ventilation, and openness allow for adaptability.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Phi Van Phan, Griffin Ofiesh, Carson Russell, Tim Brennan, John Yurchyk

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Installation No. 13, Souvenir Pile

Venice, Italy, 2014

A souvenir pile. A reconstitution of material discovered in Pompeii. Rebuilt as resin blocks. Rebuilt to rebuild. Each one a different material from the original. Together they form a wall. Maybe a tower. It’s rearrangeable. Anyone can take them. A reminder of 2014 and 150BC simultaneously. Like a snowglobe of the pantheon.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Griffin Ofiesh”
Fabrication: SWAL

“Elements of Architecture,” La Biennale di Venezia Architecture 2014, June 7–November 23, 2014
Curator: Lucia Allais

 

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Community Center No. 5, Hawai’i Presidential Center

Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, Community Center, Auditoriums, Classrooms, Labs, Offices, Gallery, Invited Competition

Invited Hawai’i Presidential Center Proposal. Eleven scattered slabs. Some islands, floating alone. Some stacked, on top of each other. Programs loosely fit within, between, and under. Organization is flexible. Everything drifts. If anything we wanted to err on openness. An overgrown landscape of local plants takes over. The roof is a public park. The public and institution are intertwined. Outside and inside are connected. Large circles are punched through the slab pile. O.O.O.O…. They move water and light. The complex feels like a ruin. It feels somewhere between random and specific. It feels like a collection of roofs, but also a collection of grounds. The building is 105,000-square-feet.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Phi Van Phan, Tim Brennan, John Yurchyk, Joanna Ligas, Igsung So, Siobhan Allman
In Collaboration with WORKSHOP-HI

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Housing No. 3, The New Radiant Plant Charter Park Gardens

Osaka, Japan, 2014

The New Radiant Plant Charter Park Gardens. A large-scale urban development in Osaka. 13 L-shaped towers. Each tower is a Trombe wall. Hyperactive. Efficient. A micro-urbanism. Or just plain old urbanism. The lower level is a second ground. A forest. Pipes run through the complex distributing passive energy. It’s a park and a city all at once.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Yann Guex-Crosier, Griffin Ofiesh, Carson Russell
Engineering Consultant: Forrest Meggers

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Housing No. 2, Towards the End of the Line

Far Rockaway, Queens, New York, 2014

Towards the End of the Line. A proposal for 2 grounds. Simultaneous and Autonomous. Raised to meet the elevated subway platform at Beach 44 St. The train is elevated for a reason. A precarious ground. The new boardwalk becomes housing. 7 Ls. 3 Os. 32 Xs. Underneath the ground is free. For wildlife, climate trauma, flooding, or rising tides. A modernist scheme without a certain rigidity. Zoning rules and property lines blur. Connected.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Yann Guex-Crosier

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Reproduction No. 9, Almost Positivist Cutting Board

O. M. Ungers, 12” x 18” x 1.5”, Mahogany, Mineral Oil, Linseed Oil

O. M. Ungers always tried to behave normally, oddly normal. Banal politeness, consideration, and the mechanical gymnastics of etiquette were carefully followed, as if he was constantly looking at himself from the outside, objectively. Sometimes he slipped – laughed a bit too loud or stared a bit too long. Not many noticed. O. M. was a polymath, a painter, architect, amateur mason, part-time biologist, and chef who single-handedly reinvigorated Schnitzel Haute Cuisine. And he liked grids. In preparing both his food and architecture, he started with a flat surface, a tabula rasa, a logical starting point, a cutting board where he could array all the ingredients. Strangely, he never indexed any of his recipes, we have no documentation, but we think this cutting board organized the mise en place for his legendary Zigeunerschnitzel, others disagree.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk

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Reproduction No. 8, Informal Plank Bench

Gerrit Rietveld, Variation No. 1, 3’10” x 2’8” x 1’6”, Oak, Oil

G. Reitveld’s first job was an assistant at a cabinet maker, specializing in Dutch half doors. It wasn’t a very well known cabinet maker. They didn’t have the luxury to be perfectionists. There were no pretensions to the work. They did their best with what they had at hand and there were many mistakes, errors and misunderstandings. These inaccuracies produced many remnants and leftovers. Every other week J. J. P. Oud would come by for lunch to discuss their zine, i10, which had a readership of about 5. This was before the internet. Every so often one of Gerritt’s interns would throw together a bench With the leftover offcuts from the shop. GR and JJPO would sit together arguing over the problems of utility and Rational Design on something somewhat like this bench, an ad hoc aggregation of planks.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Cal Carter

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Reproduction No. 7, Coat Hook Thingy

James Stirling, 2.5” x 2.85” x 1.25”, Mirrored Stainless Steel

James (“Big Jim”) Stirling loved non-sequiturs. He occasionally blurted out “neon sherbet lime green” when friends and colleagues asked him how his day was going. He never worried about making complete sense, or following any so-called unifying order. He liked parts. And he liked coat-hooks, especially simple matter-of-fact hooks with lots of different coats on them. This coat-hook was taken from a badly faded, black-and-white photo of James Stirling. The location is unknown, but it appeared floating in the background. It was probably done by Stirling – or maybe Léon Krier, depending on its original color.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk

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Reproduction No. 6, Average Soap Dish

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 5” x 5” x 1”, Mahogany, Tung Oil

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was known to play radio static at a low volume in his studio. Employees recall how he seemed oblivious to the constant drone, even though it drove them mad. “Well, it turns out that essentialism and universalism eventually leads one toward noise,” recalled Gertrude Goldstein (a former intern). Other than static, Ludwig was also known for his love of Adolf Loos and washing his hands. This soap dish is a reproduction of an old soap dish found in his studio. We’re unsure if he designed it or not, but we do know it was there, in the background, as he worked.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk

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Reproduction No. 5, Utilitarian Stool With No Design Whatsoever

Ray Eames, 14” x 16.25” x 16.5”, Oak, Oil

At a cocktail party, Charles recounted the design for a compact wooden stool that Ray made from a leftover barrel. The stool wasn’t designed. It was a simple necessity. Ray sat for long hours making delicate Rube Goldberg devices out of leftover pieces of junk. Charles thought the stool had nothing to do with their design work. It wasn’t pushing the limits. It didn’t redefine the problem. It wasn’t the latest cutting edge technology. Yet, somehow he still loved the cute, awkward clunkiness of it. This reproduction has been made by the Carter Workshop.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Phi Van Phan, Cal Carter

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Reproduction No. 4, Soap No. 24

Lilly Reich, 4.25” x 4.25” x 2”, Soap, Oils

Before entering into the Bauhaus Textile Program, Lilly was enrolled in the little-known Bauhaus Modern Seife Program, an academic department based upon the design of Avant-Garde Soaps. The Seife students were known to take 4–5 baths daily in order to test their art, which explains their radiant complexions in early photographs. The program was notorious due to a string of scandals, and was shut down within weeks of its inauguration. Even though it was very short-lived, the soaps were known to provide an uncanny cleanliness through abstraction. Lilly produced some of the most important Early Modernist Avant-Garde Soaps of her time, although all written evidence of the program has since been destroyed. What little is known was through undocumented conversations between Bauhaus maintenance staff and their children.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Benas Burdulis, Emil Froege

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Reproduction No. 3, Possibly a Vase

Aldo Rossi, 3.25” x 13” x 3.25”, Ceramic, Glaze

Very few people knew Aldo Rossi was an incredible hoarder of junk, especially Japanese metabolist paraphernalia. Maybe this was because he had a difficult childhood or maybe it’s because he simply loved objects, like teapots, stovetop espresso makers and postwar toasters – things untethered from a specific site. Whatever it was, he just couldn’t stop collecting stuff. Domesticated objects marched along, repeating themselves, showing up in projects or drawings. Skimming through his teenage notebooks, we came across an incomplete sketch that this object is based on. Please note that we are not sure if the represented color faded over time or if it was intentional.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Benas Burdulis, Emil Froege

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Reproduction No. 2, A Stool, Bench, Or End Table

Robert Venturi, 6” x 18” x 18”, Aluminum, Powder Coating (per single unit)

While working at Louis Kahn’s office Robert Venturi used to doodle in the margins of the drawings. Lou would get frustrated and say, “Bob. Really. What is this crap? Can you please erase it?” This reproduction is based on one of these erased doodles. The dimensions were interpolated, but his voice is evident even in this early and modest piece. Figuring out the extent of an object from an erased doodle is difficult, so the object is sold in multiple pieces that can be fastened together to whatever desired length and configuration.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Benas Burdulis, Emil Froege

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Reproduction No. 1, Scented Candle

Adolf Loos, 6.5” x 7.5” x 6.5”, Wax, Pine Oil

A young Adolf Loos was attending the infamous design workshop held by Josef Hoffman, who was at the height of his influence in Viennese society. Hoffman was teaching all the students to produce decor in the new Modern style. At that time, the architecture world was interested in the production of totalizing atmosphere and ambience. Atmosphärmoderne as it was known in the academy. Under Hoffman’s direction Loos spent a few weeks designing a scented candle. It was done in “Viennese Schwarz,” which was known as a specific type of black. It smelled like “Kalkalpen,” a specific forest where he spent his childhood searching for mushrooms. The candle aggregates to make larger agglomerated compositions. Unfortunately, there are almost no drawings or images left of one of Loos’s earliest designs.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Benas Burdulis, Emil Froege

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Apartment No. 2, With Walls For Storage

New York, New York, Living Room, Kitchen, Bedroom, Study/Guest Room, Three bathrooms

An apartment for a collector. The walls are cabinets. Plywood interiors. Minimal or whatever. Things are collected inside the walls: storage, stuff, a Murphy bed, a TV, works of art, clothing, design objects, thingies,… Some things are hidden. Some are on display. It all depends upon one’s mood. The cabinetry insulates and connects. Stripes and patterns organize, locate, orient and disorient. Flooring and lighting are rotated in relation to the walls. They appear slightly disconnected, as if floating… It is a project made of material details. Custom tiles with various deformations, combining materials rough and smooth. A custom silver curtain to block the outside, as needed.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, John Yurchyk, Andrew Frame, Ivi Diamantopoulou, Michael Abel
Photographer: Lauren Coleman

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House No. 9, With 6 Rooms

Location Withheld at Request, 2014

A retreat. 6 cubes, 10 rectangles, and 2 cylinders. A cluster of 6 symmetrical figures. Informally arranged. Swarms. Flocks. Piles. Every room is a module. Every module a room. Each repeats, but with a different use: living room, kitchen, bathroom, and 3 bedrooms. But they could all be something else. Technology is the only thing that makes them different. Sinks. Stoves. Beds. All have solar chimneys. Like something you might see driving through western Massachusetts. They are still. Their attitude seems playful and philosophical or maybe we’re projecting.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Phi Van Phan, John Yurchyk

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Store No. 2, Chamber

New York, New York, 2014-16

48 barrel vaults; 48 linear light fixtures; 14 Carrara marble shelves; 135 aluminum rods; 1 glowing triangular sci-fi looking niche; 102 linear feet of lighting track; 7 perforated-metal wall panels; 6 unperforated-metal wall panels; 13 square, marble display surfaces; 3 skylights; 2 wood doorstops; 1 custom toilet paper holder; and 46 aluminum bars laid in a concrete floor. A couple bad ideas. A couple good ones. Chamber is an accumulation of stuff. It accumulates stuff. Systems of display. A chamber. A gallery. Design. Underneath the Highline. Near the center of something. A leftover space, quote-unquote cold and dark. A broker was involved. The client sometimes believes design is a sort of pagan religion. Worshiping idols. He calls it Chamber. We call it Chamber. We measured. An archaeological excavation of the present. We drew as many vaults as we could. They fit around ducts, pipes, and beams, as many possible. We couldn’t fit more into the strange landscape of the ceiling.  Everything else was trying to be empty. An image of a sanctuary, or a real one, we’re unsure. A drawing of marble etched into real marble. A chamber. A store. A temporary figment of our imagination.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ivi Diamantopoulou, Carson Russell, Thomas Heltzel, Cara Liberatore, Yann Gay-Crossier, Phi Van Phan, John Yurchyk
Lighting Design: One Lux Studio
Signage: Studio Lin
General Contractor: Remont
MEP Engineer: Plus Group Consultant Engineers

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House No. 8, With 4 Towers

Location Withheld at Request, 2014

A house with 4 towers. A house of 3 levels. A house built into the side of a hill. To some it looks defensive. Like part of a castle. Some can only see a castle, a kind of hollow, crenelated retaining wall. Some see Donald Judd. Some see neither. Its lowest level is mostly buried. A studio for ceramics. There is one side open to the landscape. The living space above connects to the hill on 2 sides. Above are 4 pavilions. Or cabins. Or guest rooms. Or greenhouses. Or more studios. They never quite decided on their use. The roof is planted. A green roof that blends with the hillside. A spiral stair connects everything together. Disparate, disconnected interiors within a singular geometric figure. We liked it. It was too expensive. It had a lot of steel and a lot of concrete. Local contractors seemed perplexed. We ended up proposing another house instead.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Tim Brennan, Ivi Diamantopoulou, Yann Gay-Crossier, Ceri Edmunds, Igsung So

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Store No. 1, With 21 Windows and 3 Doors

Miami, Florida, 2013

A Miami Storefront. 21 windows and 3 doors. Made from something like a Processing script. Developed from Software No. 13, FACADE. Marble veneer makes it look monolithic. Its wholeness gives the punctures meaning. Their placement seems more unusual. Uneven. Illuminated at night. Recessed lighted built into window setback. The peculiar alignment is based on a simulation. A digital world with gravity. The building is a split second of the simulation. A snapshot of a larger experiment. Probably this doesn’t matter. A window is a window. A place to look. To fill with things. We don’t mind.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Carson Russell, Phi Van Phan, Thomas Heltzel, Ivi Diamantopoulou

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Mixed Use No. 2, Studio and Apartment

Brooklyn, New York, 2013

Can’t say where. Nobody is supposed to know. A rooftop. An apartment. An art studio. A garage. A basement. Things that are separate and connected. The existing facade remained, square holes were added. Separate, connected with holes. Other holes were filled with new bricks. The building was built behind the facade, it becomes a wall, a quote un-quote facade. New additions in polished stainless steel. Light scoops were added to bring light and air down the painting studio on the ground floor. Light chimneys. Passive ventilation. Three voids of light and air connect the roof with the studio. They go through the apartment. Separate and connected. A folded aluminum staircase, parts bolted together. Holes for cats to move around. Holes that look. Many cats. A volcano of skylights at the center, to bring light and air and space into the apartment. Different aggregates in the terrazzo concrete floors. Craft. Handmade tiles. Beautiful stone. Qualities impossible to photograph.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ivi Diamantopoulou, John Yurchyk, Tim Brennan, Thomas Heltzel, Phi Van Phan, Andrew Frame, Cyrus Dochow
Structural Engineer: Robert Silman Associates
MEP Engineer: Plus Group Consultant Engineers
Photographer: Michael Vahrenwald

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Object No. 9, Picnic Table

A metal picnic table. Pieces are held together by 11⁄16” galvanized hex bolts and nuts. The table comes apart easily. Although we have never tried. It’s site specific. We would raise the bench 3/4” in the next version.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Phi Van Phan

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House No. 7, With 2 Perpendicular Volumes

Columbia County, New York, 2010-2013

2 vernacular pitched roofs, hollowed out and intersected. A T-shape, stretched or squished. Ts are the opposites of Us. A house from 2 houses. Its shorter volume is for public spaces. Its longer volume for private spaces. And an entry where they meet. Bath and bedrooms float inside. Freestanding, like objects. Like the fireplace, the tubs, the kitchen island, the oversized chimney. The spaces are a discreet collection within a continuous interior. No one goes down there, but there’s a basement. It’s wrapped entirely in OSB. A lot of things are continuous, monochrome. A lot of things are readymades, an assembly of products and warranties. The exterior is galvanized aluminum. Standing seams. Stripes. There are a lot of parallels. Except for the entry; there are rotated stripes there. Diagonals.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ceri Edmunds, Jerico Prater, Joel Stewart, Mathew Staudt, Ivi Diamantopoulou, Andy Rauchut, Paul Frederickson, Benas Burdulis, Alexandra Karlsson, Iggy So

Structural Engineer: Nathaniel Stanton, Craft Engineering Studio

 

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Everything All at Once: The Software, Videos, and Architecture of MOS

Book, 176 pages. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Including Sylvia Lavin, “Architecture Beside Itself,” Michael Meredith, “P.M.S.A (Post-Medium-Specific-Architecture),” and Hilary Sample, “Preface.” 6” x 8.25”.

“Preface,” by Hilary Sample

This book is at once a compilation of time-based media with three distinct types of projects: software, video, and built work, albeit temporary experiments that no longer physically exist. The importance of assembling this collection of projects together is twofold: firstly, to put forward a model for a design practice, and secondly to illuminate the increasing significance of representational media to contemporary architectural discourse. Each of the projects found within this book presents different times, narratives, and spaces simultaneously; they coexist, underscoring that we live in multiple times and spaces. As architects, we try to be guided by creating a new space to work within through the production of multiple narratives. These narratives promiscuously intrude and interplay with one another. This book proposes a way of working within the world at large through playful creation and creativity (rather than solely through habits, traditions, or the practical). Architects today are too sophisticated to act totally spontaneously, and architecture is too complex to be approached without a little self-consciousness.

In this post-medium age, where any type of architecture is assumed possible and where multiple discourses continue to emerge, architects increasingly have expanded their concerns, concentrating on not only form-making but also issues beyond building-from urban design to infrastructure to ecologies into a world of forces and vectors. At the same time, most architects inhabit niches within which they work, contracting from a totalizing form of practice. Today, there are more camps than yesterday. The fight between dogmatic ideologies has been usurped in favor of a seemingly limitless number of practices and projects. In order to be effective, an architect’s concerns must expand beyond architecture, not contract.

We frequently choose to produce experiments that reference these new considerations, attempting to relate architecture to these issues, as opposed to giving up on architecture. We believe that the architect’s ability to enfranchise is significantly more important than creating buildings for the sake of building. We do so by interjecting narratives that play out through time-based media and rethinking representation that hints toward history, while exploring contemporary graphic techniques to produce visual acuity. The built works shown here were commissioned projects with an expected physical architectural presence, through the making of something real, material, and shaped by physics. These projects all share the characteristic of being very temporary, and inevitably were removed from their original, intended place of construction. Each work’s agency, however, has not been to remain as a singular project in the end, but rather to exist through multiple forms of media. We filmed the provisional work, leading to an afterlife as a video accompanied by immersive sound and closed captions. Through this process, the temporary has been a subject that we approach without angst. It’s the type of work most young firms are presented with and it’s the world we operate within. We try to transform these temporary projects into something else, in which we reference history and contemporary everyday life.

In combination, software, scripting, and Processing produce a framework within which we interact. The core of each work exists within a certain language (videos rely on scripts that are different from the scripts of the software), within sets of references and forms. These forms, while arguably not formal, make reference to history, social anxieties, cultural tropes, bad jokes, and games found within architecture’s discourse and should be observed as disciplinary experiments. These media, however, do not replace older and more traditional techniques of architectural production, which we still employ, such as large-scale physical models.

Although we make this work for the office and a small group of friends, we’re hoping to produce a new audience that shares our pleasure for new informalities and generates new enthusiasms. We’re seeking to introduce a space between an internal audience and the world at large, rethinking architecture’s meaning through post-medium specificity. The desire for a carefully considered effectualness in creating environments and narratives within and about architecture is presented in this book as experiments and an interpretation of past histories, while dealing with the present social agency of architectural medium.

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Pavilion No. 8, Night Club

Mexico City, Mexico, 2012

Another pavilion. A lost competition. Plywood Blocks. Hollow. A Stonehenge of Speakers. String Lights draped from the roof. A square roof. Glitter mixed with graphite for the ground. A makeshift club. A block turned on its side for the DJ.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Paul Ruppert

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Pavilion No. 7, Droop

A pavilion kind of like Software No. 12 DROOP. It droops too. A few extrusions lay over each other. They look like they were pushed out of a Wilton Extra-Large Pastry Bag Tip, the #2D flower tip. They look like Churros or noodles. Frozen in mid air where they fall. An IRL screenshot.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Zach Seibold, Mathew Staudt

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Already Happened Tomorrow

Video 13:51

(New Logue Lane)
1. The sun was either setting or rising, it was impossible to tell at that particular moment.
2. Maybe, Maybe not.
3. He said we could solve his problem using methods more advanced than squinting and meditation [concentration], more advanced than anything we could have imagined. And, even better, someone might make a fortune doing it.
4. Holding a dusty wooden prism, he asked each of us to choose: “Architecture or Revolution.” Maybe it was the thick accent, or maybe it was something else entirely, but I swear he said Architecture or Resolution. …unfortunately, we chose Architecture.

5. It has been a mess ever since. It has always been a mess. All we see are ruins, encrusted with glittering static.
6. Hilary said, Modernism has been presented as a ruin since the Beginning. Whenever that was, maybe the Renaissance. The exact date keeps slipping backwards.
7. We argued vigorously – the relative superiority of the Post-Pre movement, the not so relative superiority of the Pre-Post.
8. The conversation flipped, the Left/Right poles reversed themselves: On and Off and On and Off, etc.… The oscillation was faster and faster until it was On and Off at the same time. The indifference went humming along – assured, if not always smooth – for years and years.
8. We heard a POP.
9. Nothing happened.
4. I suppose we expected something different, something like “ruins-in-reverse.” The citizen [inhabitants] abandoned altogether the idea of something better. They chose quantity over quality. (Quality was too politically sensitive. Quantity was an easier subject).
3. After a long pause, Hilary whispered, “This place is like so many other places. It’s so American…a market-driven collection of discrete enclaves…an Archipelago of distinct lifestyles…simultaneously connected and disconnected by intricate hierarchies of roads and highways. The highway and archipelago produce each other. Within this system, the poor and lower middle classes are fundamentally excluded, assigned to a different enclave – the ghetto, the constituent alter ego of the lifestyle-enclave.” Nobody paid attention, it registered as another fleeting sound bite in the thick [thin] of the massive staticky crumble.
1. Have you noticed, when someone is really looking at something they become paralyzed for a moment. For most people, there is nothing worse, nothing more embarrassing or humiliating, than being caught in this state.
7. It seemed like a long pause, but eventually we overheard someone screaming on the phone that the over-professionalization of architecture lowers perceived risks, increases investment opportunities, and works counter to experimentation. Hilary whispered to Barry, “What happens when experimentation becomes professionalized? This happens now, with the edgy expressionist designs built everywhere. It’s so quote un-quote experimental.”
[#.7] The [gymnastic] excitement [commotion] bores us to tears.
[3.5] The erotic potential of formal gyration, hyperbolic twisting, folding, distortion, mannerism, [insert “operation” c. turn of the millennium here] is negligible. We have to unlearn how to unlearn things. The anti-semiotic regime of architectural production, the grunts and distorted moans of twisted, folded grids [etc.] offered no way out. Nowadays either you double down and twist the twists or find something else… because these effects are reversed on us. They are full-blown corporate commodities. There’s no way for us to produce architecture through negation or pure positivisit logic. It is simply not available to us.
6. Parallel Entropies, simultaneity, whatever. If you just wait long enough, at the exact right moment, these entropies align and give the illusion of a grand order. But most of the time we are all just standing around, not really looking at each other, waiting for something to break.
2. The history of the city is a history of repetition.
1. The “Urban” has been replaced by the “Social.”
3. They presented an imaginary “public” that either overemphasized sameness (as in Modernism) or exaggerates difference (as in Postmodernism). The Public vs. Private dialectic, which is so often delineated in design, felt more meaningless than ever. There are no hard edges to public or private – they’re part of the same topographic networks of foam – the archipelago. Within these island networks, we’re trying to collapse the distance in-between.
[2.1] We are always being offered the false choice between autonomy and heteronomy. The hyperbolic Art/Life split crudely divides the disciplines of architecture and urban design. Architecture is Art for Art’s sake, and urban design is about Life and the messy contingencies of the world. The best thing to do with these policed narratives is confuse the categories in order to produce frictions and new frequencies through inclusion. This is as close as we can get to demystification.
5. In cities, the most public space is not the street or the park. It is the compressed space of the window. The window is our urbanity, nothing else can come close. Its effects are what artists have been trying to produce over and over again for centuries. We love that impossible space of the window, the thing we cannot occupy.
5. As I was walking the dog, looking back at our house, I couldn’t help to notice how beautiful she looked, lowering the blinds.
4. Dear Mr. Logue, I’m so sorry. I can’t even tell you how sorry I am. Why does everything have to come to an end? Ed replied, “Humanity continually fantasizes about its demise. Everything is beyond its expiration date. We share a conceit that our time is the worst time.”
3. We drove all night trying to find a way home. Eventually we realized that with the current infrastructure, our methods no longer appeared to be methods at all. We had to walk home. It reminded us of that story from our childhood: after wandering through a dream that allowed us to conjure up all our wildest fantasies in the world, one after another with real abandon, we found that we could no longer maintain these illusions. Unable to conjure our way out of the problem, we changed our methods entirely, thinking only of our bedroom window and what that would look like from the inside looking out. Then we sat in bed and posted our dreams online.
7. Jane wouldn’t stop berating Ed that community participation produces great cities, but we couldn’t think of a single example. Ed tried to ignore Jane, he turned to Hilary and said “Architecture is caught within a double bind between a politics of service (community, capital, etc…) and the politics of aesthetics (cultural narratives). One problem is that their politics operate at totally different time scales, aesthetics are much slower than service. Our politics consists entirely in the awkward relationship between two (at least) contradictory terms through which the subject is defined.”
9. Jack stared at his feet and mumbled to himself. “Politics ruptures the institutional dialectic – and not only between power and its subjects, but also in the idea that there are dispositions ‘proper’ to such classifications.”
2. Do you agree with the statement: After all, nature is better than art?
1. At first, it was difficult to find a way around this place. More important than maps, we had to create an entirely different temporality, [not sure what this means exactly] [An entirely new mythology, not a dream, not just looking backward or starting over, but operating on itself.] Methods for the production of instability (a.k.a politics), through weird concoctions, oscillating frequencies and dirty frictions. As everyone was sipping their coffee amongst the smoldering ruins, this was our best guess. We had no idea where it would lead… [We need something hopeful here.]

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Mat Staudt

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Housing No. 1, MoMA Foreclosed

Orange, New Jersey, 2011

MoMA Foreclosed. A proposal for a city without streets. Instead collective housing. A large-scale urban development. Something from statistical analysis. A collaboration with an economist. Ed Glaeser. We made videos. A Jane Jacobs inspired slow-pan. Not statistical, but close. We learned that streets are 22 percent of the proposed site’s total land area. $642,958 in annual maintenance. This is an alternative. Thin buildings zig-zag into small spaces. An array of four story townhomes. An expanded field. A loose aggregation of parts. Self generative. Algorithmic. Intersections create courtyards. A walkable city. Locally governed. Dense. Collective. Growing.

TO-DO LIST #1
1 Understand Orange, NJ; look at the site economically and infrastructurally.
2 Attempt to describe “social” space.
3 Finish material research into Aerated Concrete, try to produce a super-lightweight foamy concrete panel.
4 Solve America’s housing problems as best you can, within the context of MoMA.
5 Finish the following text:
Replacing the “Urban” with the “Social”
We like cities like we like ruins. Urbanity as the entropic other to architecture is over. There’s no need for us to claim its demise; it died a while ago – a quiet death played out one single-family house at a time. We now have the social, with the never-ending cascade of tweets and bleeps. Things have become more and more, and more and more diffuse. What else would explain the endless proliferation of life-satisfaction indices: consumer confidence, quality of life, livability, happiness, etc.? The social attempts to quantify experience, to calibrate its effects, to pin down relationships through documentation. The “social” objectifies “relationships.” We are data to be shared. We are communication. We are economics. We are political widgets.
Despite its insistence on typological/morphological/Palladian authority, postmodernism was not about the city or the urban, it was about the popular reception of the city; its symbols, its images. The mannerist proclivities of shape making. We know this is not revelatory, we just wanted to make that clear. PoMo architecture was not in search of the Other of the city, but it was a process of subsuming the image of the city within itself and within a cultural language. The cheeky references, inside jokes, and historicist figuration was all a ploy to kill the entropic urban. The city is dead, long live the city!
6 Make a model, write a script, make a movie of the model.
7 Despite everything, try to have fun.

TO-DO LIST #2

1 Work on the unit layouts, try to think like a plumber.
2 Continue material research into aerated concrete, call around for samples. Find a manufacturer to partner with us on producing some prototypes for the exhibition.
3 Contact Hanif Kara/AKT and ask them for more information on aerated concrete systems.
4 Finish movie of the existing conditions, focus on filming the Oranges at dusk or night when the vernacular forms are on the verge of being erased by nightfall.
5 Decide if we should or if we shouldn’t, make up our minds whether or not we should do something fantastical or practical. How economical should we really be, really?
6 Renegotiate our agreement with MoMA so we can stop blogging weekly.
7 Reread “I Bought A Little City” by Donald Barthelme

TO-DO LIST #3

1 OK, we tried to-do item #6 from last week, but couldn’t convince MoMA.
2 Brainstorm a Title:
New Logue Lane (Replacing the Urban with the Social)
No-property
Private Public
An Alternate History of Orange, NJ
A Walk through Orange, NJ
Fill In-
Close Open Ends
Houses, Stairs, Paths, Gardens
3 Change our mind about the title.
4 We’ve made progress on last week’s #5, and tentatively decided to be Both.
5 Study unit types and rethink the ground-floor spaces to accommodate other programs such as clinics, markets, gyms, pharmacies, etc.
6 Work on the roof, is it a collective space?
7 Work on “Thoughts on a Walking City” – Scheme B
If the streets are the only truly social/municipal space left in cities, and if the financial burden of maintaining infrastructure is becoming less and less desirable for cities in economic hardship, then why not reclaim the streets for development? This makes particular sense for sites located next to a train station or transit hub where streets would not be necessary. Emergency vehicle access could be accomplished through oversized sidewalks. The infrastructural costs for a walking collective would be greatly reduced, their taxes reduced to reflect their use of infrastructure – reducing the burden on the poor and middle-class. (In general, taxes should mirror our use of infrastructure- denser cities should have lower taxes.)

One of the abstract questions this raises is how do we understand public freedom for the poor and middle-class. “Freedom,” like “spirituality,” has become so vague it makes us cringe to even discuss it, and it’s a value we’re constantly re-evaluating. (In some aspects we’re less free than we were twenty years ago, in others we’re more free.) Today, with the expense of fuel, the burden of infrastructure, growing health care costs, an obesity epidemic, and rising unemployment – should we put an emphasis on economic freedom or spatial freedom? Is it even possible to separate these?

Architects typically argue for freedom as a liberation from the tyranny of our surroundings. Part of what we do is provide difference, alternative ontologies, alternate subjectivities and politicize an audience through buildings. When thinking about the abstraction of freedom, an emphasis on “spatial freedom” would focus on transportation, movement. In one instance, it could be about openness, access, speed. In another instance, it could be the literalization of movement, trying to produce unstable objects. (For some, symbolic movement can be enough liberation.) Economic freedom is much harder for us to understand as architects, and ironically the symbolic freedoms of architecture are incredibly expensive to build.

So, as architects who’s freedom are we engendering? It’s an impossible question. The imagined freedoms of one generation become prisons for another, the “plinth” is one example, “Modernism” is another, “Post-Modernism” is yet another. We’re not sure it’s something to worry about, but something to recognize. (Urbanization could also be argued through a generational lens, that one model continually gets usurped by another… baby boomers seem to prefer suburbia, generation-xers prefer the city, etc….)

The mythological freedom of the street persists and it’s something that can be used towards producing a free zone, where the societal live/work split (aka commuting) can be radically re-imagined. There would be no individual property ownership as we currently know it, there would be shared equity models, etc.… owned by the collective. This is a different type of freedom, a freedom somewhat removed from property, as opposed to freedom that relies solely upon property.

TO-DO LIST #4

1 Talk with the economic team, need to finalize economic data on infrastructure.
2 Think about writing something on the extra helpings of false choices (unfinished)… It’s a bad title, we know. We’ll change it eventually. “False Choices” sounds like a melodrama on the Lifetime channel where moral dilemmas offer only tragic, teary-eyed outcomes. But MoMA, like the Lifetime channel, has programmed Foreclosed with a series of imaginary moral hazards. Behind the wizard’s curtain is the nauseatingly cyclical Art/Life debate that has become part of postmodernism and architectural avant-garde practices of the 1960s onward. (Sure, we can understand it through Constructivism, but its current incarnation is rooted in postmodernism.) The Art/Life split crudely divides the disciplines of architecture and urban design. Architecture is Art for Art’s sake, and urban design is about Life and the messy contingencies of the world. (i.e., there’s no urban design department at MoMA…) Architecture is a disciplinary problem and urban design is a problem of management and good stewardship. Of course, these absurdly reductive categories are useful until they’re not. MoMA/Buell, Barry/Reinhold have created a double-headed institution with a double-bind from the very beginning, where architecture exists as something distinct from urbanism. We’re offered the false choice between autonomy and heteronomy – you can only choose the red pill or the blue pill. Do we talk to an academic audience or do we try to be populist? Do we engage the market or try to remain outside of it? Are we critical or practical? Utopia or Main Street? Facts or fictions? Blah, blah, etc, etc…. The best thing to do within this context is confuse the categories, choose “all of the above,” in order to produce frictions and new frequencies through inclusion. It’s as close as we can get to demystification.
3 Delete last week’s text on unstable objects, form, radical inclusion, whatever – the thing about the strange freedoms of architecture. (As a side note: please understand that these are all written in about five minutes before they’re due. Really, how do people find the time to blog regularly?) We just wanted to reiterate something about instability and entropic form. It’s something we’re interested in. It’s part of our office culture. We make software to produce failures and entropic forms, etc…. We prefer rough/base materiality and we believe to operate as avant-hyper-self-conscious architects. You continually dismantle architecture, and instability is one way to do that. That said, what troubles us about the supposedly eroticized liberation of symbolic movement – superimposition, hyperbolic twisting, distortion, mannerism, etc. – is that these techniques have been institutionalized methodologies for over 20 years and in the end they produce stability. Institutionalized liberalism isn’t liberalism… For some generations of architects educated under a semiotic regime of architectural language, the grunts and distorted moans of twisted, folded grids can engender freedom, like the heavy feedback of punk rock, but those of us who were educated through those techniques find no liberation in it. Either you double down and twist the twists or find something else…because its effects are reversed on us. (Punk rock is used to sell cars nowadays.) An example we like to think about is “The Grid.” The grid, as described by Rosalind Krauss in the late 1970s, was a sort of meta-condition, a deductive layer underneath form, outside of history, an attempt at silence. But today the grid has become an image, a commodity filled with references. There’s no way for us to produce architecture through negation or pure positivist logic. It’s not available to us. You can’t remove the endless array of references in the world of Google – all we can do is find ways to produce instability through weird concoctions, oscillating frequencies and frictions.
4 Seriously, we’re convinced not a single person reads this blog. You’d figure we would get a snarky comment or two, or the random insult.
5 Make more and more models, until we’ve convinced ourselves.
6 Finalize the MOVIE footage, start on the narrative…

TO-DO LIST #5

1 ***Deleted due to inappropriate content***
2 Design. Design. Think about it. Check e-mail. Reflect on the world at large. Design some more. Check e-mail some more. Look at phone. Make a model. Get a coffee. Instant message with some friends. Update “status”; yes, we’re in a Relationship. Procrastinate. Surf and collect references. Remind yourself it’s all been done before. Design even if you don’t want to. Repeat.
3 Do as little as possible. At some point in the process, we realized that there is no way to solve this problem. It’s too large. We suppose we still want to solve it, we’ll do our best, but we’re hampered by the fact that we’re architects. Everyone thinks we just deal in luxury goods and they might be right. Anyway, we started this process looking at generic structures. This history of the city is a history of repetition – the repetition of generic structures. Agglomerations whose distance and density depends upon methods of movement, economy, social relationships, and public health policies. Our concept of the generic isn’t a modernist universal structure, or a meta-whatever, the idea of generic urbanism is akin to social networking, which relies upon a common format that you can plug into, customize, inhabit, whatever. (Think Cedric Price Fun Palace.) Nowadays, there are no exteriors, there’s only interiors, and interiors within interiors, etc…. Listen, we’re all for idiosyncratic forms, we love them, we make them, we think that IS Architecture, but for better or worse in this particular case we’re more interested in a specific urbanism and a relatively generic architecture, something made to be repeated. Okay, you caught us, we like repetition, we like rhymes and references. References could be Venice, or Aldo Rossi’s housing at Gallaratese, or the Smithson’s Golden Lane, or Kahn’s Design for Philly – who doesn’t love all those arrows marching along in unison? We’re completely uninterested in composing a pleasant Andy Griffith set or extravagant dynamic spectacles. We just want it to happen, not composed, filled without thinking too much. Like that Barthelme story we posted weeks ago, don’t be too imaginative.
4 Work on Format, Presentation, Exhibition. Every week MoMA asks us what are we presenting… “Hilary and Michael that all sounds fine, but what is it going to look like?” MoMA structured this as if they’re teachers and we’re students. It’s our least favorite aspect of the MoMA experiment. We hated being students. Barry wants to make sure everything is clear, that the public understands it. Reinhold says we should be speaking to the collection. (See last week’s post for reference to this conundrum.) We keep telling them it’s under control, no problem, we can handle it, etc. We tell ourselves that too. This isn’t much to go on. We understand MoMA’s position, we feel their pain. The way we work is that have to make stuff to see if it’s any good. Despite how much we talk and write, we don’t put faith in concepts or intent, we believe in things. We’re pretty literal. We make it, then stare at it – working iteratively. Like some of our recent work, maybe everything should be rendered at dawn or dusk, maybe with fog/mist, representationally destroying the architectural object, maybe with scientific color-spectrum effects done wrong (done aesthetically), every color all at once, maybe with drawings superimposed, maybe a day/night loop so that it has no beginning no ending… Ideally there’s a sense of humor to the narrative, strange miscommunications, misreadings, awkward silences, etc. Who knows? We’re all for inside jokes. At least we should enjoy ourselves even if nobody else does… Basically we’re shooting for a strange concoction of real and representational, neither completely and both at the same time. We’re open to suggestions. We currently want to focus on a LARGE, immersing movie, sort of like a Mies drawing. At a recent pin-up someone said our movie draft looked “Lynchian.” We never thought of that, but it sounded great.

Not a TO-DO LIST #6

Disclaimer: These past few weeks we’ve posted in an “informal,” blog-ish manner, exaggerating informality for effect. We have used an overtly personalized “we.” “We” thought we were being sincere. Our reasoning was influenced in part by the provocation of reimagining the “American Dream” as laid out by The Buell Hypothesis – a task that requires reimagining urbanity. There’s nothing radical about the observation that urbanity has changed over our lifetimes. We began this project with the statement that the urban has been replaced with the social, and it’s a thought we’re still trying to understand. What we thought we meant that the idea of a “public” has shifted in how we construct identity, how we relate to others, and how we communicate. (At their core, architecture and urbanism continually construct their subjects.) The institutions of architecture and urban design postulate an imaginary “public” that either overemphasizes sameness (as in modernism) or exaggerates difference (as in postmodernism). Today neither approach seems prescient. The blog format, tweets, texting, and the like have reworked social relations at a very fundamental level. If urbanity at its core is the construction of identity, then address, facade, style, neighborhood, etc. all produce collective ontologies and values. They reflect upon us. Social media has produced new social intimacies and subjectivities. We know it’s trite, but today we exist in a cultural space that is neither hegemonic nor heterogeneous, but rather simultaneous. What used to be marooned inside our heads now floats freely in data clouds. Our fleeting thoughts have become potential media events, and this media constructs our identity as much, if not more than, address or neighborhood.

The dialectic of public vs. private, which is so often delineated in design, feels more meaningless than ever. There are no hard edges to public or private – they’re superimposed topographies of networks, bubbles, spheres, and foams. In this landscape, what is the role of housing, or architecture? Are we just one more layer of information, or do we try to exist between multiple layers. As abstract as it is to consider, we’re attempting the second option.

We probably don’t watch as much TV as we should, but a pedestrian example we recently noticed is a strange advertisement for luncheon meats. The husband is at home on the couch obsessed with his phone and his wife wants to tell him it’s time to eat but he’s ignoring her staring at his phone, so she sends him a message with a picture of the product they’re trying to sell. It’s such a strange ad with recursive media, looking at the TV of someone looking at their phone, domesticating our obsession with communication and technology to the point where the representational world of media surpasses the real world.

As troubling as the confusion between the real and the representational is, we’d like to believe that our desire for constant communication will eventually lead us towards public transportation. As all of us are more and more plugged in, eventually there will be limits to the simultaneity. We’re betting that we can’t really totally exist in multiple spaces at the same time, that we can only oscillate between them. Texting while driving is already a major health issue.1

Anecdotally, it’s impossible not to notice the numbers of people texting and using their phones while driving, talking, watching TV, etc. This distraction or desire for communication will only continue to become more and more present, which is great for our energy policy and public transportation.2 As legislation is introduced forbidding driving while texting,3 people will have to choose either to communicate, blog, tweet, text, etc. or drive. The irony with this line of thinking is that as we become more and more obsessed with our gadgets, navel-gazing and communicating, the more we worry about constructing our identities, the better citizens we could become.

In this regard, our proposal for a walking city, a city where people’s main mode of local transportation is pedestrian and where they would take public transportation for work, should not be considered nostalgia for some vague sense of traditional values. It’s not about looking backwards. Rather, it is looking forward to a better future.

Notes

1 Often lumped into the broader category of Distracted Driving, texting is considered the most alarming, as it requires visual, manual, and cognitive attention. In general, drivers who use hand-held devices are four times as likely to get into car crashes. Their reaction times are delayed as much as having a blood-alcohol concentration of .08 percent. In 2009, distracted driving accounted for 20 percent of injury crashes, while 18 percent of fatalities involved reports of cell phone usage. (National Occupant Protection Use Survey (NOPUS), National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA))

2 Fuel usage is reliant on a number of factors that are increasingly relevant for our site in Orange, NJ. Distance to the nearest central business district (Newark or Manhattan), density, the use of public transportation, median income, household size, etc. As density and the reliance on public transportation increase, the amount of gasoline used per household decreases noticeably. (Edward Glaesser.)

According to a study in 2006, it was “estimated that over 39 million gallons of fuel are consumed annually for every one pound increase in average passenger weight.” Further, if each driver were to reduce travel by one mile, in just six years the obesity rate would lower by more than two percent. (Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey, L.A. McLay, S.H. Jacobson, Virginia Commonwealth University.)

3 To date, 34 states have banned text messaging for all drivers, while nine of those states also prohibit the use of hand-held cell phones while driving. (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), State Highway Safety Offices.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Katy Barkan, Jason Bond, David Delgado, Leigha Dennis, Ian Donnelly, Justin Fowler, Griffin Frazen, Steve Gertner, Fabiana Godoy, Marti Gottsch, Jeremy Keagy, Kate Lisi, Meredith Mcdaniel, Magdalena Naydekova, Mathew Staudt, George Valdes
Filmmaker and Photographer: Christopher Woebken
Housing Specialist: Eric Belsky, Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University
Public Health Specialist: Kelly Brownell, Rudd Center of Public Health, Yale University
Economist: Ed Glaeser, Department of Economics, Harvard University
Climate Engineer: Emilie Hagen, Atelier Ten
Landscape Architect: Chris Reed, Stoss

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House No. 6, SOLO

Matarraña, Spain, 2011

6 T-shaped concrete volumes. Upside-down Ts. Towers. 4 stand up, huddled around exterior spaces. 1 is horizontal. Looks as if it fell over, bad Mannerist slapstick humor. It has bedrooms in it. Another is a swimming pool. 5 solid plus 1 void. Most are linked together, 1 floats alone. The Ts have a reveal at the base, as if they drift. Like air hockey. The spaces are thin, pushed against the exterior. Stretched. Inside and outside are close to each other. They are unfinished, scattered, a ruin. Tall grass is on the roof, similar to its surroundings. It feels buried. The house sits amongst a grove of olive trees. It has forgotten what time it is.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Marti Gottsch, Phi Van Phan, Jerico Prater, Joel Stewart, Ivi Diamantopoulou, Benas Burdulis

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Krabbesholm Højskole

Book 60 pgs, Denmark: Krabbesholm Højskole. Including Kurt Finsten, “Krabbesholm Højskole” and Esther Choi, “From Object to Field: Sketches for a Virtual Ecology." 7.7” x 11.6".

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School No. 1, With 4 Rooms

Krabbesholm Højskole, Skive, Denmark, 2008–11

A school. Built on the Krabbesholm Højskole campus in Skive, Denmark. Our contribution is a group of four studio buildings. Art. Architecture. Graphic Design. Photography. A little campus on the campus. The buildings are connected by a courtyard. Places to hangout, share ideas. The courtyard, a result of their calculated ad hoc arrangement. It feels informal but not it is not unintentional. The buildings are oriented towards each other. A painter watches an architect in confusion from 100ft away. An architect watches a graphic designer go home at 7PM from 80ft away. Large square windows make these connections easy. Between private studios there are covered porches. A social space. The porches are shared. Filled with chairs and tables. We all need to take breaks every so often. We all like to look and listen and be in conversation with others.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Nicola Laursen-Schmidt, Marti Gottsch, Jerico Prater, Meredith McDaniel, Marti Gottsch, Zach Siebold, Mathew Staudt
Structural Engineer: Hanif Kara, Adams Kara Taylor

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Software No. 11, JAM

Processing, 2011

A bunch of sticks try to stand. 43 total. When something is jammed it means it has become unmovable. It is stuck. It is a structure. A logjam without a river. It is an improvised structure. It is jamming, like an aging rocker, like if Fugazi were a bunch of 2x4s. This is a script for jamming things together. Gravity wants things to fall. Try to make them stand. Even if only for a few moments.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Jason Bond

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Software No. 10, BALL

Processing, 2010

Clusters of spherical objects are tethered together through invisible springs in compression. This informal packing of balloons is then shrinkwrapped with a sock-like mesh surface, sometimes woven, sometimes a fuzzy array of normals.  A badly formed foot. A pile of poo. A cactus. And other things.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Jason Bond, Niko Stahl

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Installation No. 12, Temporary Cinema

Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 2010

Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Oh

We developed a software to tessellate a crude object. A boulder or something found at sea. Adrift. A whole made from carefully calibrated parts. Prefabricated aluminum pieces are like the outline of masonry blocks. Lightweight stereometry. One block at a time. Weird igloos. Once together everything is covered in sprayed on gypsum fireproofing. All seems hidden under a furry white shell. Precision pieces obfuscated. The result is something organic perhaps and theatrical. An object to go inside of and watch a film.  An object to be watched in.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ashley Bigham, Jason Bond, Meredith McDaniels, Mathew Staudt
In collaboration with Tobias Putrih

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Not Negative

Video 13:52

Nobody knows exactly when it all went wrong. But after IT ended everyone decided it was better to live outside. The reception was better. The signal was clearer. The old buildings became fun to visit, but they were ruins from another subjectivity. People just couldn’t relate. If it wasn’t for the necessity of plumbing they would have disappeared long ago. Everyone just preferred being under the bubbles, amongst the air waves. The decision wasn’t completely rational. And global warming wasn’t the reason for IT, but it helped justify their subsequent decisions.

Majestic empires, with their impenetrable disciplines, had vanished, their unfathomable fortifications of logic were destroyed by the eleven degree shift in the weather. Everyone moved north. Then the spheres arrived out of nowhere. People were skeptical at first, but they adapted. The spheres did everything, they regulated energy consumption, they protected people from the rain, and controlled the climate. If they wanted to travel they could just hook up and float. Any conceivable image could be projected on to them, all you had to do was think of it. Even without the images they were fun and happy but, most importantly, they boosted the signal. Within this new landscape of bubbles the reception was unbelievable. You could see your friends so clearly, it was like they were real.

Other than the loss of permanence and architecture, which nobody seemed to miss, it seemed that language had changed radically, even the concept of language was different. People just didn’t use it as they used to. Everything was considered abbreviated slang for something else. There was no proper usage, no right way, no moral imperatives, no formal or informal. The institutional apparatus of language was finally toppled. Amongst the vast ruins, institutional narratives stammered and stuttered along with awkward analogies and stilted humor for those few that understood them. Neolang, as they called it, was like the old venerable one it replaced. It produced “us and them,” a sort of tribal mentality. The promises of Universal Language of Unmediated Pure Thought (U.L.U.P.T.) never happened. Before the spheres arrived, everyone gave-up on U.L.U.P.T. preferring the cultural market (the politicized messiness of Relativism) to the idealization of an Absolute Architecture (A.A.). Those few that continued to search for absolutes only found these inaccessible spheres. Globalization never fulfilled its totalizing promise. Instead it produced New Primitivism (N.P.), albeit on a larger scale and based on wireless technology. Through Globalization, Technology became Nature’s doppelganger, it was everywhere and nowhere. It became the new sublime. Eventually humans couldn’t think without their instruments. They couldn’t write or draw unequipped. Even the media was mediated.

Despite the radical mobility provided by these spheres, people began to move less and less. The spheres were tethered to the ground where people would gather “instantaneously” for a moment and then disappear.
(The following video is an edited documentary, filmed between 9am and 6pm.)

TXT.3M1X3: Recently, I started using SanoteeⓇ to help me fall asleep, it’s supposed to stop incessant dreaming. Dreaming was becoming a distraction from sleeping. Anyway, last week, I forgot to take it. I can’t remember exactly when I fell asleep and the delirium started. All I can remember from my dream is complete NONsense, a meaningless argument that was argued with intense ferocity. It caused such inexplicable panic that I awoke, sat up and stared out the window at the bldg across the street. It was on fire, the whole thing felt like a movie. I haven’t slept since.

TXT.4TT13: Really tired of the bubbles everywhere. What’s the point? They’re too quote unquote POPGothic for me, too Post-NeoWave. Isn’t that over? OK, maybe they were interesting for a moment, but only with the “nasal charged” 3D glasses, SONO aural enhancers and a ton of Scripted Plug-ins. Sure with the Upgrade Package I watched them drift and wiggle in Hi-Def, but now I can’t see the sky anymore, when I look up all I see is ground.

TXT.64ER54: Architecture became everything and then, simultaneously, it was nothing. It seemed to become the most irrelevant thing in the moment it was all-encompassing.

TXT.34AW42: Yesterday I noticed the kids in black climbing the Sky Tomatoes again. They were climbing at a fast and constant pace trying to get to the originating point. At halfway they yelled down at me – “This is neither human nor post-human, neither conceptual nor real. It is in a constant state of becoming!! The closer you get to it the further away they look…” I had no idea what they were talking about. I looked away. Then the one with the large black glasses threw down an old book, it landed with a thud. Books were deemed bad for the environment decades ago and recycled back into trees. I took the book with “The Treatise” printed on the cover. It was beautifully illustrated. I hid it. Then he yelled, asking if I could build a building in the space between mirrors. By the time I yelled back, that I had no idea what he was talking about, but I thought I could, they had vanished.

TXT.1A2T60: I see what you’re saying, but personally it’s too weak and undefined as an overall form… Too Happy! Too Lite!! Not everyone loves a balloon. Also it’s always on the verge of failure. Last week a few renegade balloons decided to attack a passerby then they swarmed and blocked all the doors. Nobody could understand, what’s with the aggression. Seriously, balloons, really has it come to this !@#? Hey btw do u still have my copy of The Open Society and Its Enemies by K. Popper? I need it back.

TXT.5O4H97: Nobody notices, but I only see obliquely. It’s almost inhuman. It’s how I noticed Frank Lytard zoning out again, staring into the spheres. When I asked him, he said it was like looking into the eyes of a Grand-Walleyed Shark, the one that was genetically engineered to be even better and more shark-like than the original Walleyed Shark. The spheres stared back with an unbearable emptiness. And this unbearable emptiness was everywhere, it was copied and pasted, iterated and reiterated, it swarmed, it was algorithmically determined, it was created using real-time physics engineers, it continually transformed, but no matter how they were organized they just stared back blankly.

TXT.4W9P81: I thought I understood architecture at the beginning of the 21st century, but now I think I misread it.

TXT.23V314: Late at night the Spheres conspired to form clusters as if preparing for a storm, but they’re naturally cryptic so I couldn’t be totally sure. Even after studying these relationships for years, I still can’t understand how they work, but the documentation and photos are even more impressive and meaningful than the actual Spheres are.

TXT.34XU02: Now that I’ve seen it, I mean I can’t un-see it. There’s no going back. I keep trying to forget, but I only end up with an unbelievable head pain. The only thing I found to cure my migraines is the National Whiskey of Thailand**–… no idea why that works, but luckily it was on sale last week so I bought a case of it. Unless the head pain gets worse, this stuff could last for years. Btw, there’s a fantastic little thatched hut on the label.

TXT.90Q3E3: I overheard Professor Cohncord, the esteemed chair of the department, saying she thought architecture wouldn’t be around in a few years. It’d be totally gone… Replaced with an array of new products coming on the market – the new Cantor-Infinitie Microprocessors, Portable Gravity Animators (G.P.A.), Ecologies 4.2 with “Bonus” GRN points and Atmosphere 2.0 (P.U.) the “Personalized Urbanism” edition. “It’s on the verge of extinction!” After she said it, I thought it could already be dead, I mean how would we know?

TXT.90K8P8: Where did you go? The solar glare was momentarily blinding and I lost you somewhere back there. I’m seeing spots, splotches of purple, everything seems to be an afterimage. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen a version of this before, like this whole thing is a weird Italian Super Retro-Fantastical Futurist Flashback, a memory of something I never experienced.

TXT.8L72Q3: I’m sorry to tell you like this, but it’s over. This is my final “act of refusal.” I just can’t do it anymore. I’m tired of pretending. We had a good run at it, but, whatever it was we had, it’s gone. Please don’t feel bad. No, it’s not your looks. You have gorgeous proportions, wonderful geometries and fantastic dimensions. Please don’t be upset. I know we wasted decades trying to make it work, but you’ll be better without me. But it’s not just me, it’s also you. You were too self-involved, too self-important. I know our little love bubble, our autonomy, made us unique, but it became suffocating. I mean the sex was great, the drugs were fantastic, but after a while we couldn’t tell the difference between fun and suffering.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, David Fenster, Mira Calix

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Installation No. 11, Instant Untitled

Venice, Italy, 2010

We’ve been thinking about writing this text for a while. Starting, then checking our emails, then stopping. It’s not easy to write about your work. Ideally, we’d write a charming text that would explain everything clearly and simply to everyone. Reading this text, everyone would smile and think “Oh, that is sooooo funny and smart and clear and interesting.” Then they would think, “Why have I never heard of MOS before?” Our office would seem more remarkable than it really is. No one would suspect that we’re boring – that we sit in front of computers and that, some nights, we even dream of sitting in front of computers. Despite our efforts, most of our work remains in the computer. Still, our work is more social than we are. It travels, although mostly it visits other people’s computers.

As we are reminded daily, this is not an ideal world. Oil is gushing. Icebergs are melting. Landscapes have been turned into corporations. Architecture is a big, heroic spectacle. Urbanism is no longer an operative surrealist exercise based on the physical juxtaposition of difference. Maybe nobody cares. Maybe nobody is reading this. We’re indifferent. Anyway, we’re not sure we can read any further, either. Some of you might wonder, “Why do we Americans even need a pavilion in Venice? It’s absurd!” In our forthcoming idyllic and incredibly thoughtful text, we’d respond by telling you exactly what “Instant Untitled” (I.U.) means, what it references, what you should see when you look at it. The first thing we would tell you is that it’s very sustainable. In fact, it’s probably the most sustainable thing in Venice. (If Rome is heavy and real, then Venice is light and fictional. But Venice isn’t sustainable. Fictions rarely are.) We might mention that I.U. has a small carbon footprint. It barely even exists. It’s an urban figment. Actually, we’re not sure what it is. But we’re sure it’s incredibly sustainable. Although, that’s really saying nothing. Now that we think about it, that’s a terrible idea. We probably wouldn’t mention it.

If you’ve seen the structure, we’re sure you’re wondering, “Why is it made out of helium balloons? Why does it make a canopy? Why is there seating, etc.?… Is it referencing other projects? Is it analogical? Is it utopian? Is it micro? Is it urban? Is it domestic? What is it?… Is this even architecture?” (Unfortunately, we can’t answer that last question. This type of project is like diet architecture, a copy without the calories. It’s got a sort of bitter aftertaste that you might grow accustomed to, or you might not. That’s OK. We like fake architecture.) We’ve been wondering, what kind of architecture would Haruki Murakami make? Well, when we finally write our text we’ll definitely tell you that it does, indeed, mean something and it does reference things. But why would you really want to know all of that anyway? Do you really think it would make everything better? What about just enjoying this weird artifice, this fake social space?… Hey, it wiggles. Look at this strange alternate environment made of reflections and repetitions. Enjoy the visual noise… Have you ever seen NASA’s Echo project? Google it. What can we say, we just love the aesthetics of radar reflectors and inflated satellites. They’re of another reality. Seriously, even if we wanted to fully explain it to you at this very moment, we couldn’t. Even though we’re trying not to be, we’re only human. Also, they need this text before we’ve finished the design. Did we mention that we’re working with the son of Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds fabricator? We’re very excited about this. He lives in Duluth.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ashley Bigham, Judy Sue Fulton, Jason Kim, Kate Lisi, Ryan Ludwig, Gabrielle Marcoux, Mike Smith, Rudolph Stahl, Mathew Staudt
Consultants: Meteorological Products, Laserfab, Strapworks, Sapio Italy

United States Pavilion, 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy

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Community Center No. 4, Lali Gurans Orphanage

Kathmandu, Nepal, 2010

An open framework. Sturdy and flexible. A community center, library, house, garden, and orphanage inside. Along with 48 children. When moving through the building one is quickly inside, outside, then inside again. It is somewhere between a building and a park. Some stairs are open-air. For wandering around the exterior frame, alongside vertical gardens. The building produces food on its facades. The other stair is interior, a vertical shaft with glazing on top for passive cooling. For efficient movement up and down. The site is humid. And seismic. The frame is reinforced concrete, sloping inward to withstand any possible shaking. Stairs double as cross bracing, further stabilizing things. It remains light and open. It feels secure but not cumbersome. And those inside need to feel secure, most of all. We worked with an NGO full of kindness. There was a major earthquake. It is unfinished, but being used. Almost nothing goes as planned.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Jerico Prater, Jason Bond, Benas Burdulis, Meredith McDaniel, Andy Rauchut, Igsung So, Joel Stewart
Structural Engineer: Hanif Kara, Adams Kara Taylor / MRB Engineering, Kathmandu, Nepal
Environmental Engineers: Atelier Ten, New Haven, CT
Photographers: Kishor Lohari, Sagar Chitrakar

“Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech,” Druker Design Gallery, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 22–March 11, 2018
Curators: Andrew Holder, K. Michael Hays

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Software No. 9, CRUMPLE

Processing, 2010

A subdivided grid of rigid triangles joined by hinges appears to be a fluid fabric. Once it is thrown up into the air, forces will inevitably wrinkle its surface. It’s a folded plate structure. When it settles, the resultant crumpled structure will be self-supporting.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Niko Stahl

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Software No. 8, GRID

Processing, 2010

The gridded matrices of springs here are never taut and beautiful. They are more often characterized by the sag and the flaccid droop (the so-called failures), the expression of gravity on a geometric form, the most reviled expressions of the physical body.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Jason Bond

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Software No. 7, NET

Processing, 2010

It is like suspending a net from a rigid compression ring but viewed upside down, or right side up depending on your orientation. You can also change the structural pattern of the net itself or add additional logic into the system. Dreaming of Frei Otto playing video games.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, William Macfarlane, Niko Stahl

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Object No. 8, Table

We wanted to make something systematic, incomplete, asymmetrical and modular. Square. Triangle. A rhombus was difficult to manufacture. A table made from 5 pieces. Each one a smaller table. Assembly optional.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample

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Object No. 7, Step Stool

A step stool made of two parts. It leans slightly. Provides access to the upper shelves.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample

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Element House

Book, 82 pages. New York: Museum of Outdoor Arts. Including Filip Tejchman, "Weird is Good" and Michael Osman, "The Architecture Composition of Environment." 6" x 8.25".

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Romance of Systems

Video 09:23

The Romance of Systems.
Frank had finished his third Manhattan.
Soon he would be talking about the “invisible grid” again.
At the moment, he was shouting at no one in particular.
F: Everything is a system. Architecture is about rules. You can’t just pick and choose.
A crowd started to form, eager to watch. His rants were infectious.
Alice quietly sipped her tonic water, closing her eyes, counting…
4 minutes and 33 seconds.
She thought she heard someone reference Rancière, but couldn’t be sure.
It was going to be a long night.

F: It’s too casual, too imprecise. The problem is that it lacks, well, a kind of hypergeometricity.
She never quite understood the words he used, and suspected no one else did either.
Behind the hyperbole, she knew there was no resistance, no complexity.
He was an aging boxer stuffing himself on hors d’oeuvres trying to relive his glory.
F: It’s anti-anti-form I’m after. You can’t just be “for” anything these days – it’s suicide.
Everyone nodded their heads in a kind of synchronized unison.
Alice sighed.
All this cajoling, she thought, it’s passé.
Fifteen years ago, she might have run off, unable to so much as feign an interest in the machismo politics of formalism.
All the talk of so-called architecture made her cringe.
It was only recently that she had begun to appreciate the inherent beauty of geometric systems, the strange subjectivity that architecture could produce.
Yet, part of it still seemed frivolous, a stylish silly extravagance.
Alice appreciated the novel use of natural light, its effects promiscuous.
Frank began gesturing wildly and sketching diagrams.
Soon he was laughing at his own jokes.
She kept her distance, even though she knew there was something endearing about his delirium.
It was getting late.
Alice decided to call a cab. She was tired of pretending.
There is no more discipline, she thought.
No shared discourse, no criteria, no methods of evaluation, just posturing and competing genres.
She knew that his elaborate gestures could not bring it back.
The night ended. The sun was rising. Half-awake and bleary-eyed, Frank sat at the kitchen table.
He marveled over the way his eggs resembled shallow domes, their yolks in perfect crystalline symmetry.
Cholesterol, she thought.
He began to construct the Farnsworth House out of toast, next to an intricate parametric dome of potatoes.
She wondered if he had thought anymore about their upcoming deadline.
Frank and Alice both worked in the architecture practice called Boudoir.
F: Well, the geometry, the relationship of part to whole, the composition, it’s too generic.
It lacks specificity.
A: I don’t mind the generic, but that’s the least of our problems. It doesn’t function. To start, the bathrooms are all wrong.
F: Who gives a damn about the plumbing? That’s what unions are for.
I’m talking about systematicity, Alice.
A: We’ve got to think more about performance.
Architecture is the production of environment, not some nostalgic ideas of form.
Frank wasn’t listening, as usual. He began sketching furiously in the margins of her newspaper.
They were oddly-shaped lumps, both seductive and ugly.
F: They’ve got to float Alice, think of it, how wonderfully complex and difficult it could be.
A: Frank, don’t be ridiculous.
Frank had produced some of the most beautifully odd things ever seen by mankind, but he hardly ever left the office.
He had no idea how people really lived.
Alice preferred wandering aimlessly through the city.
She was always trying to convince him that the vernacular was interesting.
Her belief was in a radical pragmatism. She knew the world wouldn’t sustain that level of excess.
Looking out the window, at nothing in particular, he remembered when they met, at the global warming conference sponsored by the Banham Corporation.
Under the fluorescent lights, surrounded by biodegradable insulation panels, he could tell she was different.
It was Frank who had suggested that they work together.
He loved her instantly.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Jason Kim

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Nowhere to Go

Video 09:53

It was a day like any other.
Nobody woke up, yawned, and smelled the coffee.
He slowly faced the day.
As of late, he had begun every day just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It was becoming tiresome, the worrying.
Recently, he felt that he kept getting the short end of the stick.
N reminded himself to play the cards he’d been dealt, but it was becoming more difficult by the day.
Finances were hard to bear.
It was inevitable, he thought, the grass was always greener on the other side.
Other than his recent unemployment, everything was okay.
His life was, all things considered, a moderate success.
He knew that the best things in life are free.

For the past decade, he had happily worked in a moderately successful architecture office in the town of Nowhere.
Things could certainly be worse.
He had a relatively nice apartment, a decent collection of second-rate literature, a three-speed bicycle he’d inherited from a friend.
He’d been to Europe twice.
He saw friends on the weekends and, occasionally, during the week for dinner.
He lived close to a park, a ten minute walk, as the crow flies.
Nobody had always thought that good things would come to those who wait and, that, if he managed not to rock the boat too much he’d someday come out on top.
He routinely claimed it was better to be safe than sorry.
But it didn’t seem to happen that way.
N woke up at 40, without a job, a jack of all trades and a master of none.
He was a ship without a rudder, doing everything all at once was getting him nowhere fast.
For the first time in his life, he was forced to stop and smell the roses, to see the forest for the trees.
Life, he decided while standing in the kitchen, was no longer worth living as a fly on the wall.
In order to make an omelette, he had to break some eggs.
It suddenly became important to grab life by the horns, to take advantage of the situation as best he could.
When life hands you lemons, make lemonade, he thought optimistically.
Every cloud has its silver lining and, for the first time in a month, the reality of losing his job seemed a blessing rather than a curse.
Today was as a good a time as any to bury the hatchet, he figured.
You only live once, after all, and there was no use crying over spilt milk.
He would no longer look before he lept, no longer cautiously wait for opportunity to knock twice.
He was suddenly happy as a lark, enervated to seize the day as if it were his last.
He was free as a bird.
There was no time like the present.
There was no place like Nowhere.
Like a bat out of hell he raced out of the apartment.
He hadn’t even thought to change out of his pajamas.
He was on cloud nine.
Forget Architecture, he thought.
He was not sure of where he would go or what he would do when he got there, but he would leave no stone unturned.
Come hell or high water, he was determined to live dangerously for the first time in a long time.
No longer would he tolerate the myriad of fair-weather friends he had accumulated over the years, the generic conventions of his work, or the restrictions of neighborly decorum.
He hurriedly passed a few acquaintances on the street corner and, for the first time ever, he refused to grin and bear a casual hello.
He had other fish to fry and it was no skin off his back.
Out with the old, in with the new.
He knew rules were made to be broken and that, today, the world was his oyster.
All the world’s a stage, he thought, as he rode towards the sunset.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Cara Liberatore

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House No. 5, With 9 Chimneys

Star Axis, Las Vegas, New Mexico, 2009-2010

The argument goes that Form is a System and that Shapes are, well, shapes. The two are disciplinary frenemies – they act like friends from time to time, part of the same clique, but in private they trash each other. Systems people are pedantic technicians, neurotic puppet masters of geometry. They obsess over means. They talk too much about process. They claim to like Schoenberg. Shape people describe themselves as cool, easy, and graphic. They’re interested in the immediacy of effects. They live in Williamsburg. Systems are typically based in plan. Shapes are elevations or silhouettes. Systems are conceptual. Shapes are commercial. Systems like repetition and difference. They use patterns, trajectories, and magnitudes. Shapes prefer singularity. They use fillets to round corners and reinforce shape. Systems are centrifugal. Shapes are centripetal. Systems get excited by the allure of computation. They play with CATIA, Processing, or Grasshopper, mumbling intensely about discretizing surfaces. Shapes prefer Photoshop and Illustrator. They use pens. Systems frustrate pictorial imagery through their emphasis on process. They gaze at their feet. Shapes relish the pictorial. They swoon for photos. Systems produce their own ground. Shapes don’t like anything that disrupts their shape.

This little house in the middle of nowhere is indifferent to all of the above.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ashley Bigham, Jason Bond, Ryan Culligan, Gideon Danilowitz, Michael Faciejew, Steven Gertner, Jason Kim, Kera Lagios, Ryan Ludwig, Gabrielle Marcoux, Meredith McDaniel, Elijah Porter, Michael Smith, Mathew Staudt
Structural Engineer: Edward Stanley Engineers
Climate Engineer: Paul Stoller, Atelier Ten

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Martell Lecture: Beginnings

Book, 72 pages. SUNY Buffalo, 6.25" x 10".

When founding our practice in 2003, we began, like most, as clients for ourselves doing small experimental projects and working in our apartment. At the same time, we began teaching. During the past six years, we have maintained a continuing interest in what we might call “serious play.” As architects who both practice and teach, we are afflicted by a particular neurosis, the anxiety of being overly self-conscious. We are constantly thinking about the reception and placement of the work, while also producing it. Today, architecture has evolved into multiple concurrent discourses. The two dominant camps are the pragmatists on one side and the computational crowd on the other. Our practice plays within both of these domains simultaneously and hopefully opens up others.

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Installation No. 10, Without Out

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2009

For us this is a long-time interest in creating crude form in Processing. Sometimes additive. Sometimes subtractive. A different kind of parametricism, where smoothness and seamlessness isn’t the ultimate goal. Though Svetlana Boym offers an explication for the project which is more poetic than that… “Ruin literally means “collapse” – but actually, ruins are more about remainers and meinders. A toys of ruins leads you into a labyrinth of ambivalent temporal adverbs – “no longer” and “not yet,” “nevertheless” and “albeit” – that play tricks with causality. Ruins make us think of the past that could have been and the future that never took place, tantalizing us with utopian dreams of escaping the irreversibility of time. Walter Benjamin saw in ruins “allegories of thinking itself,” a mediation of ambivalence. At the same time. The fascination for ruins is not mere intellectual but also sensual. Ruins give us a shock of vanishing materiality. Suddenly our critical lens changes, and instead of marveling at grand projects and utopian designs, we begin to notice weeds and dandelions in the crevices of the stones, cracks on modern transparencies, rush on withered “blackberries” in our ever-shrinking closets.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ashley Bigham, Michael Faciejew

“Without Out,” MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 23, 2009 – January 3, 2010

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Installation No. 9, Rainbow Vomit

New York, New York, 2010

A processing script stacks cubes at random. We made 128 iterations. One was particularly appealing, though it’s hard to say why. We wanted to see it big. As if the computer spit it out. There were 253 cubes. Built from foam. Every cube was labeled. There were given names. G94–133. They were organized for assembly. We placed each one carefully. Gradually building the pile. Mimicking the computer as best we could. Each cube was painted a shimmering grey. A shiny effect reminiscent of digital luminescence. Once together it fills the room. We felt like we were walking inside the computer. A crude parametric.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Jason Bond, Ashley Bigham, Judy Sue Fulton, Jason Kim, Meredith McDaniels,

Vice Magazine, Milk Gallery, New York, New York, 2010

“Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech,” Druker Design Gallery, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 22–March 11, 2018
Curators: Andrew Holder, K. Michael Hays

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Software No. 5, EROSION

Processing, 2009

Pixelated caverns are created from the erosion of solid blocks. There is something satisfying about the anticipation of a collapse. It is the childlike pleasure of knocking blocks over. A loss of precise control should you decide to make it fall apart. This is a good place to catch your breath amidst some of the more precarious operations.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, William Macfarlane

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Software No. 4, SAND

Processing, 2009

Sand is defined as a loose granular substance. Sometimes sand is a verb. Sand can stack and pile. This is software for making sand or installations or who knows what. We are playing.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, William Macfarlane, Niko Stahl

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Pavilion No. 5, Shenzhen Pavilion

Shenzhen, China, 2009

What was once a table can become a pavilion.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample

“Architecture Creates Cities. Cities Create Architecture.” 2011 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, December 8, 2011–February 18, 2012
Curator: Terence Riley

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Installation No. 8, Pile

Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2009

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Michael Faciejew

In collaboration with Tobias Putrih

“Intervention #10,” Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, May 16–October 11, 2009

“Inscriptions: Architecture before Speech,” Druker Design Gallery, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 22–March 11, 2018
Curators: Andrew Holder, K. Michael Hays

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Installation No. 7, On the Verge of Collapse

Gateshead, United Kingdom, 2009

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Michael Faciejew

In collaboration with Tobias Putrih

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom Tower, 10 April – 6 September 2009
Curator: Alessandro Vincentelli

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Escape (Correspondence)

Video 25:45

1.10 Beyond the intricate and interconnected system of ditches, gardens and solid waste ramparts – beyond every layer of surveillance and information awareness – is the frontier.
1.11 Between the frontier and the frontier of the Others is a vast, uncultivated no man’s land.
1.12 This barren expanse was once a teeming jungle. After decades of slash and burn agricultural practices, rapid soil depletion and increasingly frequent storms, however, the landscape changed dramatically and irreversibly towards its present state: a snowless arctic plain dimly rendered in hues of gray.
1.13 It is considered completely uninhabitable.
1.14 Yet, somehow within this impenetrable landscape, there is evidence of a small encampment subsisting within a fragile and carefully managed micro-climate. Despite many years of research and widespread analytical efforts, the subjects of this camp are still not very well understood.
2.10 The camp consists of at least sixteen interconnected volumes arranged in a cellular pattern within a series of three concrete-walled courtyards.
2.11 Each volume looks like it is part of a larger system, constructed in a similar fashion – it appears to be the mysterious work of a hive-mind.

2.12 If the subjects of the encampment are assumed to fall within the normal range of current body dimension indices (a controversial point which is by no means certain), it is possible to measure the structure quite accurately: the volumes range in height from 12 feet to 42 feet, in width at their bases from 8 feet to 32 feet and in diameter at their apex from 3 feet to 20 feet. The surface area is approximately 10,000 square feet.
2.13 Some analysts believe the structure is designed for simple shelter and environmental control: reliable cooling breezes augmented by fine mists from what appears to be an automatic humidification system. Others believe it is designed to communicate with an archipelago of other camps in the no man’s land, although so far no other camps have been discovered.
2.14 Work on deciphering the possibility of communication is currently underway.
3.10 The campsite was discovered by the Brunelle-Fink exploratory expedition. The basis of everything we know about the encampment is what the expedition members recorded in their mostly empty notebooks as well as 24 minutes of silent video footage.
3.11 The entire encampment would have gone unnoticed by the expedition had it not been for the unsettling appearance of its exterior cladding: a dark and rough fiber thatch derived from the once ubiquitous Ibutu sugar palm tree.
3.12 Cultivation and fabrication of the uniquely shaped thatch pieces that clad each volume could not have occurred locally, owing to climatic conditions and the subjects’ apparent lack of technical knowledge. By the time this camp was originally constructed, all Ibutu trees had vanished from the area.
3.13 The thatch was either transported over extremely long distances or was salvaged from stockpiles created during the time when such plants were used as emergency food rations during the dry season. Some analysts who have argued that the thatch was transported believe this to be a sign of a particular spiritual and economic significance associated with the cladding.
3.14 In support of the so-called “long distanced surface cladding theory,” considerable research has been directed towards the known hallucinogenic effects of the hatch. Analysts believe that early in the construction process the thatch became contaminated, perhaps purposefully, with fungal spores at an unknown transshipment point. These spores, while normally innocuous, mutated after a long period of dormancy in the unusual climatic conditions of the camp.
3.15 Upon inhalation, the mutated spores germinate in the lungs, releasing a serotonin-like substance into the bloodstream and causing a long lasting mild euphoria with intermittent periods of intense vomiting. This euphoria is characterized by an increased sense of purpose – under the influence of the fungus, subjects typically work themselves to exhaustion with an overwhelming belief in what they are doing. There appears to be no long term damage associated with the fungus.
3.16 With the exception of the base plates, which are welded together, the other materials of the camp are fastened with extremely simple means – set screws and thermoplastic ties. The use of these primitive connections, when other more effective and less labor intensive systems are readily available, indicate that this camp is a temporary nomadic installation.
3.17 The type of labor associated with these connections – highly organized and mindless – also indicates that the encampment is probably overseen by a singular and all-powerful institution.
4.10 Within the camp there is abundant shade with more than 90% UV protection, providing relief from the harsh sunlight.
4.11 The configuration of the volumes seems designed to produce an evaporative cooling effect by working with the existing air flows of the site’s geometry and orientation. Through the placement of concrete thermal mass (a term the subjects use to describe the material retention of heat), a low pressure differential between outside and inside generates relative air flow through the project. The attenuated form of the towers and the dark insulating thatch skin also provide increased radiant thermal absorption, reinforcing induced air flows. These airflows seem to be part of an important ritual that is still not well understood.
4.12 The limited written documentation related to the encampment indicates that environmental performance is an important part of its discourse. With its natural cooling systems, the encampment seeks to promote a stasis of the earth’s environmental conditions so that all life forms will evolve at a slower pace than could otherwise be expected.
4.13 The rational futility of these efforts, irreconcilable with their spiritual motivation, contributes to the general malaise of its subjects.
5.10 Some analysts, especially Sir Fredrick Alton, have argued that this camp provides the missing link in a particular branch of architectural evolution regarding structural form and architectural surfaces, linking Gaudi, Candela, Fuller, to name a few. Others think it was simply idiosyncratic for its era.
5.11 The taller more conical forms of the camp appear to resemble an archaic industrial form from an earlier civilization, the smokestack. This is puzzling to analysts given the intentions of the environmental performance program and the iconic value attached to these archaic forms – they are more than anything else, the symbol of precipitous environmental and evolutionary change associated with global warming. Given the predisposition against radical changes to the environment, the analyst K. Pinkus writes that this contradiction can be explained as a cult-like manifestation of the quote un-quote death instinct, which underlies all cultural production.
5.12 The forms and cladding also recall primitive vernacular huts. The familiarity of these forms, known instinctually at birth, gives comfort and reconciles technological change with innate bio-cultural memory.
6.10 The nomadic camp is strangely located within a permanent and fortified enclosure, a subject of much debate and confusion concerning whether the fortification was constructed before or after the camp. Its entrances are highly controlled so that relaxation can occur there without disruption from the outside. This is a special place for a culture that values leisure as a symbol of its economic success.
6.11 The subjects can be described as a self selecting group, with remarkably similar emotional and physical disposition, both of which can be described as aloof or apathetic. This can be seen in their choice of uniform garments: monochromatic suits and ostentatious eyewear. The facial expressions of the inhabitants are attentive but subdued and have a particularly limited emotional range: mostly they stare blankly at each other with complete disdain.
6.12 They choose to communicate with each other infrequently – having each developed and exhausted only a small repertoire of useless topics in which they consider themselves experts. They find most communication burdensome and demeaning, only making them more uncomfortable and paranoid about their dwindling presence within the no man’s land. The noted exception is an occasional violent outburst concerning leadership and mating rights.
6.13 The repetition of intimate urban environments with a range of scales and the use of ephemeral elements – for example, benches that can be easily rearranged, the mists of the humidification system and the pattern of light and shadow under the structure’s roof – are used to trigger a set of loosely defined social formations and dynamic emotional responses. The matrix of possible social formations in this system, however, typically fails to inspire anything radical or new. If anything the subjects seem to oscillate between extreme aggression and deep boredom.
6.14 Sometimes, for no reason at all, the subjects abandon their characteristic attentiveness and choose to sleep during the middle of the day, with their eyewear on. In his third analytical text on the subject, Goterdike writes that, this compulsion to sleep at irregular intervals, and usually all at once, is a particular anomaly of this encampment. Goterdike explains this anomaly as a psychological coping mechanism in response to the perception of a premature arrival of the future.
6.15 According to the documentation, the subjects all profess a deep knowledge of what the future will look like. Unfortunately, it looks different for each subject. In their spontaneous napping rituals, the inhabitants reenact their pre-natal state by each choosing one of the implied volumetric spheres as a substitute for the womb to occupy alone.
6.16 Their bodies appear atrophied. This is apparent, despite their garments, in the way they walk, hunched over, with the appearance of chronic pain and occasionally wave their arms in the most unconvincing gestures. They are not comfortable with their own bodies. They have chosen to evolve into sessile and complacent creatures.
6.17 Late at night, those who cannot sleep sometimes try to imagine the sensation of a crowd and the enormous parties they believe to have occurred in this encampment many generations ago: the orgiastic frenzies lit by fire light and ritual intoxication, the dark corners where offspring were conceived and trampled bodies piled up, a fertile concoction of glistening flesh and decay.
6.18 Over time, it appears that the folklore regarding this previous era has been greatly exaggerated, leaving the subjects feeling even more distant and alienated from their own culture.
7.10 At some point during the expedition, it is believed that some of the subjects decided to escape the camp’s increasingly harsh environment and decreasing mating opportunities. They decided to reintroduce themselves into the surrounding no man’s land so as to inhabit it with the use of new technologies that would make life possible there.
7.11 As much as possible, given their situation, they tried to prepare themselves for the challenges they would meet outside the courtyard walls: how to avoid predators, find food, travel, navigate, associate with any remaining nonspecifics in a normal fashion and, most of all, what kind of shelter they would create for themselves outside of their fortification. These subjects trained to regain their fine motor skills, flight responses, physical strength and stamina. They simulated social situations, creating elaborate fictional stories, trying to imagine the foreignness of the cultural patterns they would encounter.
7.12 The subjects trained for months until a malfunction with the humidification system, although not life threatening, triggered a series of hostile interactions ultimately related to mating rights for the upcoming breeding allotments. While this type of belligerence had become increasingly rare and even made some of the subjects nostalgic for earlier times, most were convinced that this was the excuse they needed to cease their preparations and get on with it.
7.13 As most of the subjects carried on destroying each other, it is believed, the youngest of the inhabitants organized a hasty and highly improvised escape.
7.14 Their whereabouts are still unknown.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Steven Gertner, Gabrielle Marcoux

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Pavilion No. 4, MoMA PS1, Afterparty

Long Island City, New York, 2009

One thing about the “Afterparty,” as we’re calling it, is the need to look for new promiscuities, new methods of design after the party of a sort of high-formalism that has dominated academic discourse of late. In this particular case, it’s with the basic structural arch and dome geometries, with rough, base materiality, and with the production of a totalizing “environment,” (literally cooling down the courtyard through the stack effect) looking toward a more primitive state of architecture. From Wikipedia: “An afterparty, after-party, or after party is a gathering that occurs after a party, a music concert, a premiere or the closure of a nightclub.” An afterparty may provide additional social opportunities for people who do not want to return to their respective homes. The main purpose of the afterparty is to provide a relaxing environment, as compared to the earlier venue, where the atmosphere is usually more frenetic. During an afterparty people often sit down, relax, and chat freely, meeting new people in a more controlled setting. If the original party continued until late at night, the afterparty will often include a morning snack, which usually counts as breakfast… Possibly in contrast to relaxation, the afterparty can provide a chance to get away from the eyes overseeing the main party. This tends to be more common in events where alcohol consumption is not allowed, such as school balls, and provides a location where partygoers are allowed to drink. In this case, the afterparty may turn out to be more lively than the main party, as the people are freed from the restrictions that were placed on them during the main party.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Carter Skemp, Matthew Allen, Heather Bizon, Michael Faciejew, Jose Miguel Ahedo Fernandez, Darby Foreman, Steven Gertner, Jerome Haferd, Maciej Kaczynski, Yair Keshet, Jason Kim, Taekyoung Lee, Ryan Ludwig, Tessa Kelley, William Macfarlane, Patrick McGowen, Miriam Peterson, Zachary Snyder
Structural Engineer: Nathaniel Stanton, Erik Verboon, Buro-Happold
Structural Engineer: Eric Hines, Le Messurier Consultants
Environmental Engineer: Christoph Reinhart
Fabricators:
Edelman Metalworks, Inc., Danbury Connecticut, all aluminum
US Netting, Erie Pennsylvania, aluminet fabric
NJ Spray Foam, polyurea finish on benches
Tropica Greeneries, Indonesia, Ijuk Thatch
Holbrook Piping, Holbrook New York.
Mary Anne Friel, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia

In the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

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Object No. 5, Lily

A few circles bend to make an object. All squished together. Folds are connections and legs. It does it all. Something related to standing seam siding, but not on purpose. We wanted this to be a building. It’s a model of a roof structure. It’s a bench system. It’s some folded circles stuck together. The circle is the most efficient shape in terms of area. We like circles. We think they can do more than you’d expect.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample

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Art Space No. 1, Artist Chapel

Tyrol, Austria, 2008

3 pitched roofs, tall like the surrounding pine trees. Everything, roof and walls, wrapped in copper standing seam siding. The interior space feels large. There are views into the surrounding forest. The landscape feels vertical. Track lighting is hung from center ridge beams. The building is both 1 room and 3. We wanted an ambiguous figure. An unassuming entrance sits at the bottom of the hill. It connects to the gallery above. It is carved and compressed. Its walls are rough. Services are hidden below. The roof drains to internal downspouts. 20 feet of snow can rest between the pitched roofs, a kind of passive insulation… Philip Taaffe was there. It was a chapel for his paintings. A spiritual place to sell art. They asked us for free work. We refused.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, James Tate, Andrew Atwood

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House No. 4, House Renovation

Lexington, Massachusetts, 2008

Originally built by Ralph Rapson in 1950, while teaching at MIT. Built with an economy. An exterior entirely made of doors panels put together. Doors everywhere. Doors as walls. Doors as flooring. Doors as doors. A House of Doors. The original client bought at least 100. They were a bargain. They were insulated, filled with asbestos. A good idea at the time. Not so good now. Painted white. Modern. Rational. Horizontal prismatic volumes. Floating, connected together. Things showing their age. Not so modern anymore. Has the beauty of a well worn piece of furniture. A new exterior. Gray cement panels. A collection of details. Some inherited. Some created. Green polka dot fasteners. Joints. Stripes. More polka dots. Solar chimneys to bring light and air inside. A few new doors. New slate flooring. Thermal mass. New cabinetry. New lighting. New kitchen. An existing building.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ivi Diamantopoulou, Michael Abel
Photographer: Michael Vahrenwald

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Transformation of a Necklace Dome (aka Alive, son of Awake)

Video 03:14

Begin.
01 First you will Transform the Necklace Dome using your computer and a parametric growth algorithm. It will be beautiful and complex like nature.
02 Then you will build it out of aluminum rods according to the plan.
03 Cut the aluminum rods.
04 Create connecting loops at both ends.
05 Place.
06 Hold.
07 Bend.
08 Rotate.
09 Bend.
10 Rotate.
11 Place.
12 Bend.
13 Rotate.
14 Bend.
15 Remove.
16 Repeat three thousand two hundred and twenty three times to form six thousand four hundred and forty six loops.

17 Bundle according to size.
18 Label.
19 Create sub-assemblies.
20 Gather requisite pieces according to the plan.
21 Create horizontal sections on the floor.
You will be working upside down. It is difficult but necessary. You will be working closely with others. You are no longer alienated.
22 Connect loops.
23 Close loops.
24 Attach vertical pieces.
25 Open loops.
26 Connect loops.
27 Close loops.
28 Leave top end of vertical segments unconnected.
29 If vertical segments form a tetrahedron above according to the plan then open loops, connect loops, close loops, close loops to form a tetrahedron. Else continue with normal instructions.
30 Attach horizontal pieces for the next tier.
31 Label the pieces that will form lateral connections according to the plan.
32 Repeat eighty seven times.
33 Connect cub-assemblies into larger sub-assemblies.
34 Attach the steel frame to the ceiling that will support the Necklace Dome.
35 Erect the larger sub-assemblies.
36 Open loops.
37 Connect loops.
38 Close loops.
39 Repeat thirty seven times.
40 Repeat steps 1–40.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Steven Gertner

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Installation No. 6, Desert Island No. 2

New York, New York, 2008

Take a project by Bruno Taut. Explode it into a surface. Grow carpet piles through mold algorithms on it. Make molds of it using foam. An iteration. An installation of 18 mats. All covered in hair. Something like a shag carpet. Or maybe more like a moss covered rock. Density and length of the rub hair is decided by an algorithm. Natural. These mats are vaguely triangular. Or maybe a square projected. It’s hard to tell. Depends upon where you sit. Still growing. Repeating. Open ended.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample

“Matters of Sensation,” Artists Space, New York, New York, September 25 – November 22, 2008
Curators: Georgina Huljich, Marcelo Spina

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Installation No. 4, Transformation of a Necklace Dome

New York, New York, 2008

The Whitney Museum. The Buckminster Fuller exhibition. An installation. Tetrahedral chains. Space Frames. Reticulárea Rocks. Structural stalagmites. Rigidity through redundancy. Compression. Geological. A kind of primitive. Beginning with rational systems. An absurd ending.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ryan Culligan, Steven Gertner, Brandt Knapp, Michelle Chang

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, June 26–Sept 21, 2008

Curator: K. Michael Hays

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The Zombies Are Late

Video 12:14

(At the end of humanity as we know it, a small group of technologically advanced zombies build an architectural time machine to travel into the future to ensure their survival. When they arrive they expect to see a teeming dense sustainable cosmopolitan metropolis, but instead arrive off-course and at night. In the dark, they are left to dream about what they might find.)

@&1t0:I’m not sure I feel any different. Being here, I think I’ve actually felt this way before… when my abusive alcoholic father died. When it happened, I exaggerated my grief to avoid almost everybody and everything. It was for a time, liberating.
M13$: We survived the Krisis, I don’t know how. People said we invented the Krisis, but I’m sure that the Krisis was real.
@&1t0: I’ve never heard such silence.
(Silence…)
M13$: And if there’s 70 billion people in there, where are they hiding? We’ll have to investigate things in the morning. We’ll have a much clearer picture then.
@&1t0: I need some sleep. The future is exhausting.
(A strangely contagious yawn starts among the travelers; M13$ lies down.)
!3c0r6: No, wake up, this is it! This is f*cking IT, just like it’s supposed to be, perfect. I will be the one to say it, you’ll see.
1o2er: If |o/—\-/o|o \–/\|o\-/||o /|o–o\-o/ //|-o-||o-o\ -//-oo/o-o—/oo/o\-o
R0607: Then oo-\| \\-o-/o| /\-o-o–|||- /|oo \|\o\-|o/-\ –\/o/- /-o\/ ||o-/o\-|o-\
(Everyone stares into the foggy distance, squinting. The air feels thin.)
(Two travelers pass out from exhaustion and appear to dream.)
p&!!&d10: I never said this is it! I NEVER said this is it! I never SAID this is it! I never said THIS is it! I never said this IS it! I never said this is IT!
a&1t0: After the Krisis there were no feelings, only the instinct for surviving. People forgot about talking. All we had was this stupid repetitive code of beeps and grunts, which made some pretty music until it got too loud and fired everyone’s brains. Now, how can we facilitate a connection? Or create continuity in the liquid? Where the interior design structures and experiences the landscape as a whole to generate understanding and a sense of pleasure in that place, it is essential to be there. We would grow new nerves. During the design of the site of integration – of existing and potential ecological wealth, of specific requirements, of the residents – the future goal is to respond to life. Organic forms, recycled and nontoxic materials, passive solar design and basic and edible landscaping to enrich the environment, to enliven the default locale used to create what the merger is for. In response to the needs of our age after the Krisis, a structure made up only of efficiency – you can become materials and healing, and it’s affordable. We are satisfied with the superior craftsmanship, careful material selection and space requirements of the efficient use and careful understanding of the individual.
(A quiet grumbling starts to get louder.)
p&!!&d10: There you go again, why can’t you die already?
!3c0r6: Hold on, I need to record this.
(Crlick, wqhirrrrr, ssshusssshhh…)
!3c0r6: THE DATE IS 6880 A.A. ACCORDING TO BEST ESTIMATIONS -(STOP)- FOGGY, UGH, FUNICULAR ARCHES, UGH, THE DISCRETIZATION OF CURVED SURFACES -(STOP)- WE DON’T KNOW HOW THEY ARE INTERPOLATED, REPARAMETERIZED AT EACH NODE, DIFFERENT NODALITIES -(STOP)- UM, REALLY PRETTY COLORS -(STOP)- EVERYTHING IS SMALLER THAN I REMEMBER IT -(STOP)- YET, I HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO LOCATE PREVIOUS RECORDINGS FROM THIS PLACE -(STOP)- IT’S AS IF I’VE ALWAYS KNOW IT, EVER SINCE I CAN REMEMBER -(STOP)- THIS MUST BE A GOOD SIGN -(STOP)- BUT LISTENING TO PREVIOUS RECORDINGS I HARDLY RECOGNIZE MYSELF ANYWAY, SUPPOSING THAT WILL BE THE CASE WITH THIS RECORDING TOO -(STOP)- IT APPEARS THAT THE FIRST PROBLEM IS TO FIND A LANGUAGE TO DESCRIBE THINGS NEVER SEEN BEFORE -(STOP)- WORK UNDERWAY ON THIS PROBLEM NOW -(STOP)- BUT SERIOUS ANALYTICAL GAPS REMAIN -(STOP)- THE ONLY POSSIBLE SOLUTION TO OUR SITUATION, ACCORDING TO BEST ESTIMATIONS, IS TO RELATE ENTIRE SITUATION TO TWO DELEUZIAN CONCEPT-TERMS… ONE GOOD ONE BAD -(STOP)- SUGGEST WE ALL DO THE GOOD ONE FROM NOW ON, BECAUSE THE BAD ONE IS OLD AND BAD -(STOP)- M13$ NOT SURE IF THIS WILL WORK AS WELL AS LAST TIME -(STOP)-
!2SS@S: o|-\\ /o-\\-oo| ||/o-/- /-\o|–/ o//|-o/|- \/o-/ \oo-o|\ -o–|/o
!o05: No, I don’t think it’s going to work. I was just napping over there and I had a dream. I… don’t quite know… what to make of it. There is a man. He’s running down the street, not too fast, not too slow. It’s nighttime – and everything appears highly polished, liquid and frozen… crystal. I have the feeling that my senses are much sharper than they’ve ever been before. I feel like I’m floating or watching TV. But then there is an extremely bright light that emerges out of nowhere, burning rapidly from yellow to the hottest white, just eating through my eyes. And at the moment that I’m completely consumed by this, the man lands on my car, because I’m in a car, yes… There is a thump and some small breaking sounds, and he’s just there and I don’t know what to do… caught in a sort of post-whatever nonsense.
^^%21!: \\-0| o|\ -o–|/o \oo-o|/-/ |–o||
M13$: If my calculations are correct, you’re not the only one who has had that dream.
(While others sleep, some of the zombies gather together to discuss the situation.)
(!o05 suddenly gestures hysterically towards the horizon.)
(The ground trembles, a series of loud cracking sounds wakes up the remaining sleeping zombies.)
(The time machine vanishes.)

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Steven Gertner

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Software No. 2, CAT

Processing, 2008

Hanging chains to make catenary curves that can then be triangulated into surfaces and panelized with ribs for structure, then unfolding and flattening everything for production files. Using physics based structural form finding towards producing panelized structures.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Jason Bond, Simon Greenwold, William Macfarlane

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X and Y

Video 05:30

Ordos 100 Lot 006
Inner Mongolia, China
This is Ordos Lot 006.
There are two inhabitants of Ordos Lot 006, X and Y.
This is Y in the gym.
Each day Y adjusts the programmed course on the elliptical exercise machine.
Today is the most difficult one yet.

After the overseas markets have closed, Y checks to see how her stocks have performed.
She hopes to one day surprise X with her earnings.
At 1:38 PM the skylight vents open noiselessly and automatically. The house will remain relatively cool throughout the hot afternoon.
This is X watching TV.
X plays video games in the game room.
Feeling guilty, X decides to take a swim.
X imagines having to take an important phone call during his swim.
How out of breath he will be.
The cook serves roasted quail, wild rice and lightly glazed root vegetables.
Everything is seasoned with fresh herbs.
Z from Lot 047 stops by for after-dinner drinks.
X serves one of the better wines from the cellar.
During the conversation, Z becomes agitated about the current political situation.
Y wonders whether the concrete walls should be painted.
Or whether the skylights should be cleaned.
This is X and Y reading together in the study.
X reads magazines and Y reads newspapers.
When Y wants to be alone, she goes to the guest rooms.
If they have children someday, these will probably be their rooms.
This is X suffering a bout of restless legs syndrome.
Y does not believe that this is a real medical condition.
Feeling for no reason less oppressed,
X gets out of bed to have a glass of milk.
The cat is surprised to see X in the small dining room.
X gently kisses Y good night.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Steven Gertner

In the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago

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House No. 3, Lot No. 6

Inner Mongolia, China, 2008

In Inner Mongolia, a desert with Ai Weiwei and 99 other architecture offices. Unreal. Other-worldly. Post-something. Pre-something. Sequestered inside a Holiday Inn, like a jury in an important murder trial. Seemingly endless possibilities. Architectural fantasies. Gated suburban nightmares. We started with an impossible idea of a parametric vernacular. Neither here nor there. An architecture of roofs. Clad in brick. With solar chimneys, for passive cooling. An architecture of rooms. Cellular. Like a stammering computational Hejduk. Like he listened to Kraftwerk. Like he could let go of painterly obsessions. All organized around 6 courtyards. Courtyards filled with water. They needed to have doubles of everything. We didn’t argue too much. 1 Chinese kitchen. 1 European kitchen. It needed a pool. It needed underground parking. It needed to be for an elite consumer. We never got a chance to talk to anyone other than architects. We had a lot of questions. We were out of our element. We had no control over what it would become. We could only control the physical space. It became a mountain range. We made friends with strangers. We found a community in the desert.

Ordos 100

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Heather Bizon, Lasha Brown, Shu-Chang, Vivian Chin (translation), Steven Gertner, Lorenzo Marasso, James Tate
Structural Engineer: Simpson Gumpertz & Heger: Paul Kassabian

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Community Center No. 2, Inflatable Factory

Newfoundland, Canada, 2007

Inflated tubes woven together. Bound by large yellow nylon straps, like one would find piled up in a warehouse. Almost parametric. Almost dystopian. And temporary. We learned a lot about inflatables, maybe too much. We spoke with engineers. We did calculations. We made mock-ups. We failed at times. A tube’s diameter is almost four times the size of the technician who inflates it. The result is 99% air. Seams are critical. Once together, the tube structure squishes to make a rigid shell. The long-span, low-pressure inflatable system forms a “woven-grid shell surface.” Harold, a world-record holder in hot air ballooning and local theater patron in Newfoundland, was the client. This is a factory for inflatables and community theater.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Ryan Ludwig, Lasha Brown, Jason Kim
Structural Engineer: Paul Kassabian, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger

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Pavilion No. 3, MoMA PS1 YAP, A Perpetual Breeze

Long Island City, New York, 2007

Another pavilion for PS1. An inflatable structure made of a reflective aluminized fabric. Woven together. A cross between a Bedouin Tent and reflective heat shield insulation. A stark temperature difference. The result is a perpetual breeze. Landscaping and planters below. Plants of different colors. Dennstaedtia punctilobula. Iris versicolor. Schizachyrium scoparium. Baptisia australis. Green. Blue. Aqua. Orange. A kaleidoscope of sorts. Reflected on the canopy above.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Andrew Atwood, Russell Crader, Darby Foreman, Steve Huang, Kera Lagios, Julia Suh, Sara Stevens, and Jason Pytko
Structural Engineer: Paul Kassabian, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger

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Fighting Against Institutionalized Formalism Through Ephemerality

Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 2007

This wall presents Avalanche magazine in its entirety (thirteen issues published from 1970–1976). Avalanche was conceived and started by Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp. Its blunt graphic design was by Boris Wall Gruphy (an anagram of Willoughby Sharp). The exhibition is organized with Avalanche as a backdrop, a landscape on top of which three monitors show video of Willoughby interviewing a fellow conceptual artist (Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden). The exhibition’s subject, the magazine and the videos are essentially interviews of artists talking informally with other artists. These interviews present an alternative discursive format to that of the art historical or of art criticism, specifically against Clement Greenberg’s dominant formalist critique of the 1960s.1 Magazines, videos, performance pieces, music, installations, happenings, conceptual art – all of these ephemeral media and performance-based practices were generational tactics to dismantle the dominant formal and critical narrative of art.

Why show this work at a school of architecture? 1. The discourses of art and architecture are joined at the hip and should be. 2. These magazines, videos, exhibitions, etc. provide a paradigm for those interested in hijacking culture or establishing generational conspiracies. Maybe these tactics are what we need at the moment (Although today’s generational problem may be the reverse, i.e. struggling against ephemerality or process/time-based practices, destroying evidence of artistic technique or signature, re-establishing a dominant narrative). That said, it is probably impossible to mount any credible exhibition against the institution within the institution, especially on a teeny wall that nobody ever stops to look at. When I say institution, I mean this legitimizing authority that you are standing within at this moment, a place that continually adjudicates upon quality and specifically aesthetic quality. Architecture schools, like art schools, are places of quality control, of “top-down” ideology from well-meaning, passionate critics who have their own opinions and beliefs and are supposed to be confronted with the “bottom-up” junior faculty and student discourse, an emerging discourse that seeks to insert itself into the cultural machinery. Of course it is rarely this clear or two-sided. Most schools are uninterested in dismantling themselves ad nausea, although they tend toward constant upheaval simply because architectural institutions, as an amalgam of different individuals, produce a collective atmosphere unsure of quality and meaning, except through a temporary, ad-hoc discourse on the specificity of things.

Why do you think we need the self-consciousness of history or theory? Why does everyone talk so much on studio reviews? History, theory and meaning are always lurking in the background, even when we try to confine the discussion objectively to rigor or to narratives of methodology. At this moment, it seems to be confusing out there (and in here too). To a certain extent, the Studioworks exhibition behind you illustrates this. Currently, we face an everything-all-at-once disciplinary model or impotent aw-shucks service profession performance pragmatism. The consensus in architecture (and art) seems to be that there is no collective project or conversation for architecture going on right now. Multi-inter-disciplinary is not enough. It opens up the bandwidth of architecture, but turns quickly into white noise. (If you disagree please email me what it is, I would like to know.) I am not even sure there has been a collective project/movement recently. The last one I can think of is post-modernism; the baby boomers still have a hold on cultural production, making it difficult for new generational narratives to occur. Since then, architectural discourse has been primarily framed through monographs, models of identity, branding, niche-architecture. Social value is measured in media events. Architectural paradigms are discussed as closed forms, not as open relationships as they should be. The imperatives are individual – get work, build it faster, get it published, repeat. The generational social unrest and public discourse of the late 60s and 70s is exactly what is missing right now in the discipline.

My regret in organizing this is that this wall is extremely small, and we are left with a tiny snapshot into an amazingly social world of experimentation – when experimentation was not looking for the “new thing” to market and make a fortune on, but when experimentation was a shared social and cathartic need. It should be noted that this is not meant as a display of Willoughby Sharp’s work, his interviews, artwork or his curatorial work (Personally, I think his curatorial work is perhaps the most interesting and important of everything he has done: Rauschenberg, Kineticism, Gunther Uecker, Slow-Motion, Light-Motion, Luminism, Kinetic Environments, Air Art, Earth Art, Place and Process, Video Performance…), but about the potential instrumentalization of Avalanche and Willoughby for us now. How can they be useful for us today in forming alternate trajectories and disciplinary narratives outside of the current ones in the institution or academy; or, how can we enter into a new discussion?

1 The 2005 Artforum article, “Against criticism: the artist interview in Avalanche magazine, 1970–76,” written by Gwen Allen is an excellent article and explains this relational discourse.’’

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Performance Space No. 1, BMDI

Marfa, Texas, 2007

A drive in performance space in Marfa, Texas. Everything around a large screen. A modular monolith. Something like the opening scene in Space Odyssey 2001, but different. It needed to be flexible. Accommodating a wide range of events. A few possibilities. Movie theater. Amphitheater. Picnic Area. Sculpture park. To adapt, the screen is made from tesselated pieces. Everything else. Bathroom. Greenroom. Projection booth. All integrated into the landscape.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Andrew Atwood, James Tate, Heather Bizon, Ryan Culligan, Maciej Kaczynski, Mathew Staudt, Ivi Diamantopoulou, Phi Van Phan
Structural Engineer: Simpson Gumpertz & Heger: Paul Kassabian
Lighting Engineer: Mark Loeffler and Chad Groshardt, Atelier Ten, New Haven

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Exhibition Design No. 2, Design Life Now

Boston, Massachusetts, 2007

We were in a Costco shopping. It looked like a good idea for a design exhibition. Originally we proposed metal shelving with with objects. It was too expensive. It would take too long. It became drywall, gallery walls.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample

ICA Design Trienniale, Boston, Massachusetts, September 28, 2007–January 6, 2008

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Exhibition Design No. 1, Beyond the Harvard Box

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2006

Beyond the Harvard Box focuses on the early work of six architects who graduated from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design architecture program during the 1940s. This generation of students studied under Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and other significant figures in the early pedagogy of modernism in the United States. All of the architects in this exhibition – Edward L. Barnes, John Johansen, I.M. Pei, Ulrich Franzen, Paul Rudolph and Victor Lundy – have had successful, unique and influential careers, forging alternate architectural trajectories of the postwar period. All of their work presented was completed during the 50s and 60s, a time when these architects were establishing their practices, and before they were lumped together as “late-modernists,” before the Vietnam War escalated, before Robert Venturi happened, before the simultaneously liberating and oppressive confusion of “post-modernism.”

Their work from the 1950s and 1960s is presented here alongside material describing the pedagogy at the GSD during the 1940s. At the GSD, our relationship with our institutional past has remained under the surface and through this exhibition we are confronted with fundamental questions concerning the relationship between the individual and institution, pedagogy and practice, leaving us to ponder how so many successful, well-respected and, ultimately, distinct architects all graduated from the same institution around the same time. Examining the student roster, it appears that there has never been a more fertile moment at any architecture school before or since.

Within architectural discourse, this period at the GSD is seen as either infamous or important. The exhibition title refers specifically to the pejorative and descriptive term, “Harvard Box,” which was coined to describe the Gropius-inspired, stripped down functionalist aesthetic. These architects have been grouped together before, in the early 1980s, the architects in this exhibition were labeled as the “Harvard Box” architects in Klaus Herdeg’s book, The Decorated Diagram. Within Herdeg’s influential book, many of the projects displayed here were considered to be evidence of the failure of modernism and Bauhaus influenced pedagogy. Eventually, this work was displaced outside of academic discourse (including the education of recent and present GSD students, myself included), elided by simple narratives of modernism and the paradigms of historical postmodernism.

This exhibition challenges the fundamental conception of the so-called “Harvard Box” architects. Through simply exhibiting and looking at their work, it is obvious that this architecture is not coherent enough to be grouped under any singular paradigm. If there is one thing these architects have in common, it is that all were known for their distinctive formal inventions, their skillful combinations of pragmatism and experimentation with figurative geometric shapes, innovative structures and a deep interest in materials and surfaces; in other words, their willingness to escape the “box.” Through a contemporary lens, we are able to appreciate the outlines of yet another alternative modernism, as well as establish reference for many current interests in architecture.

Presently, as the discipline has moved beyond a self-consciously defined architectural moment, where confusion and anxiety have become academic, we as students and architects can see the design mandate of this work as instructive and the projects as remarkably prescient. Of course, we no longer talk about “spirit.” Instead, we talk about “appropriateness,” “performance,” “intent,” or “desire.” So, if the modernist social directive of pragmatic functionalism – that seductively reductive endgame of architecture – gave way to artistry, figuration, signification and expression, the problem for us all is the same as it was then: how to use the architectural problems of function, context, typology, history, and mine pragmatic technique to solve concrete problems and produce progressive and responsible buildings. These projects by our architectural predecessors occupy an important and complex moment in our history. The exhibition, with its emphasis on pedagogy of the Harvard Graduate School of Design as it is being presented within the same school, is highly self-conscious. Hopefully it will also be instructive, representing a diverse body of design research and innovative, good architecture that I believe is useful to re-examine today as practicing architects and architecture students dealing with similarly complicated questions within our own undefined moment. And at least to me, it appears new again.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Helen Han, Justin Huxol, Michelle Chang, Steve Gertner

Druker Design Gallery, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 5–November 15, 2006
Curator: Michael Meredith

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Studio No. 2, Artist’s Studio

Ancram, New York, 2005-08

This artist’s studio has an expansive interior, like a hollowed hip-roof or large urban loft teleported into a rural landscape. There are entrances on all four sides to allow for easy access between inside and out, uninterrupted by structure. The building envelope has two layers of wood framing and insulation, providing a high level of acoustic and thermal performance. The open interior contains a freestanding object located toward the center of the studio at the ceiling’s highest point, containing mechanical services, bathroom, and storage. This blank storage structure occupies the studio’s visual center and redirects views obliquely toward the outside. The addition of three-legged moment frames at both ends of the building transform the hip-roof shape of the studio and provide the structure necessary to allow for the interior’s large, open span. The entire exterior surface of the building is clad in zinc shingles. The elemental parallelogram geometry visually destabilizes the studio and makes it feel untethered from the surrounding landscape.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Chad Burke, Fred Holt, Elliott Hodges
Structural Engineer: Nathaniel Stanton, Craft Engineering Studio
General Contractor: Richard E. McCue, Inc.

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Studio No. 1, Art Historian’s Studio and Library

Ringoes, New Jersey, 2005

We were asked to renovate a barn. A library and studio. Two levels. Library downstairs. Studio atop. Shelves below. A large desk above. To better share heating and cooling the levels had to be separate yet connected. We made holes in the floor. We love making holes in things. Holes that were there before us. We filled them with resin. The floor is a highway for light and air. Cool air from below. Light from above. Air from above. Light from Below. Perforated spaces.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, James Tate, Ryan Bollom, DK Osseo-Assare, Monta Lertpachin, Meredith Harris
General Contractor: Pinneo Construction

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Installation No. 3, Softcell

New York, New York, 2005

An installation of 30 mats. All covered in a kind of fuzz. Made from pouring silicone into milled nylon molds. Something like a shag carpet. Without the baggage. Or maybe more like a cheetah. Or maybe a bear skin rug. Density and length of the rub hair is decided by an algorithm. Topographical. These mats are triangular. Growing. Repeating.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Temple Simpson

Henry Urbach Architecture Gallery, New York, New York, 2005

In the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

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Object No. 4, Garden Shed

Ancram, New York, 2004

A very long perforated shed. Just the right size for a pile of logs. Probably enough to last two to three winters. The pattern of the perforations comes from a Processing script. Pieces fold together like origami. Anyone with a CNC can make it pretty easily.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Jaron Lubin
Photographer: Michael Vahrenwald

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Object No. 3, Ivy Coat Hooks

Common ivy is sometimes called Hendra helix. It stays green all year long. Ivy is a climbing, trailing, and creeping vine. We were interested in making something parametric. We don’t really “like” parametricism. It was more an interest in computers. Coding. Patterns. Something that seemed random. Something that could grow.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Andrew Atwood, Jessica Rosenkrantz
Manufacturer: MRKT, Brown Dog, USA

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Software No. 1, FORTRESS

Processing, 2005

The start of something. Playing around with writing software. In an instant. Invisible spheres. Forces. Attraction. Repulsion. An impenetrable dome encrusted with tetrahedral springs, growing and layering around unseen geometry. Within a gravitational environment with realtime structural analysis. We were looking a lot at the engineering of Robert Le Ricolais. We were experimenting with something new.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Simon Greenwold

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Pavilion No. 1, Puppet Theater

Carpenter Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004

A prefabricated theater. Something temporary. Sited below Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center. The Carpenter Center holds the largest collection of 35 mm films in New England. This theater was commissioned for the building’s 40th birthday. A place for a Pierre Huyghe performance and film. We knew it’d be something techno-biological. Uncanny. We tried to match. A structure of light weight panels. Stacked. Bolted together. Smooth and reflective. Yet, it is covered in moss. Growing and fuzzy. The most complicated low-tech acoustic insulation we could think of.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Geoff von Oeyon, Chad Burke, Zac Culbreth, Elliot Hodges, Fred Holt
Fabrication Team: Ryan Bollom, Defne Bozkurt, Chad Burke, Zac Culbreth, Jess Golbus, Helen Han, Elliot Hodges, Fred Holt, Jimenez Lai, Jaron Lubin, Brendan McCarthy, Michael Meredith, Diane Ryhu, Hilary Sample, Temple Simpson, Geoff Von Oeyon, Gia Wolff
Photographer: Florian Holzherr

In collaboration with Pierre Huyghe

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Notes for Those Beginning the Discipline of Architecture

Video 35:55

For those beginning the discipline of architecture: You are about to learn that the hardest part is determining the problem you’re trying to solve. (Please note: If you thought architecture was simply a question of technical expertise, stop reading to reconsider your disciplinary decision. You could prevent innumerable headaches.) Your glorious newfound problem will, of course, have to do with the particularities of construction, with pragmatism, the material world and technical innovation, but it is also something larger, much more elusive, both personal and historical – the intangibility of which is equaled only by its immeasurable weight. This imperative problem, which you’re asked to concurrently formulate and solve, while simultaneously establishing some sort of verbal theoretical framework for others to engage it, has to do with design’s determination of order, structure, organization, etc… and its significance within the world through various formal, material and programmatic incarnations, but nonsensical architectural jargon leaves you unsure of both its necessity and meaning. One thing is for sure: the more you study, the more problematic your problem will become.

You will think you have identified it in the forms and spaces that have already been built; suddenly you become confident that technology will clearly delineate it. This anxious problem will continue to elude you, as you are, simultaneously, too far away and too close to be able to make it out completely. Like a cyclist, you keep pedaling to avoid falling over. There will be those who don’t think you should choose such a jim-dandy of a problem; they will tell you to opt for many minor, more manageable problems, or say that your problems should be fleeting and provisional, shifting with the cultural winds and whimsy of your clients. (Others might advise you not to think about problems at all but to focus on happier things, to sit back and enjoy the ride, to leave the problems to architectural theorists and historians who will surely appreciate your pleasant disregard of problems, because your thinking could get in the way of their ideas.)Problems will crop up frequently, in many shapes and sizes. While determining the contour of your newfound problem (architecture itself), you will inevitably attempt to describe the pressures that surround and form architecture’s context (culture), which at first glance seems logical and progressive (think Hegel), but upon further investigation erodes into a heap of contradictory, inchoate stuff (think Derrida). Your problem begins to divide into two problems: the problem itself, and everything surrounding it. To describe anything accurately is to distinguish it from its surroundings, to take its measure from things around it and, in doing so, outline it objectively. You think architecture, like a diamond, depends upon unbelievable pressure exerted upon it. Unfortunately for you, the more you stare into the crystalline abyss, the glimmering noise, trying to understand its makeup, the more the parts refract and retreat from each other. Your problems will become ever more distant: architecture and the world it relies on spread further apart. Like the Eames’ film Power of Ten, each problem will continually retreat. Even when you think you get it, it slips away as if wanting to avoid capture. You wish that architecture were a rock you could lift to see what’s underneath, but it’s too heavy. So architecture remains mysterious, a slithering world of activity supporting a monumental weight. Through your work you begin to realize that architecture’s referents are an unstable smorgasbord, but your foolhardy hunter-gatherer instincts compel you to ignore these momentary insights into the elusive nature of everything; it is as if you’re biologically predisposed to continue with the enigmatic chase. Secretly, you’re left wondering if serendipity reigns supreme. Waiting at the dentist’s office, you thumb through an old copy of the New Yorker and read George WS Trow’s essay “Within the Context of No Context,” which beautifully illustrates how culture is fragmented and isolating: a reflection of the desperate nature of the current cultural situation. While reading, you wonder: how can anyone produce anything meaningful, especially architecture that resonates within a context of no stable referents? As disturbing as this is, the text consoles you, as if just knowing that someone else is confused can establish context. Does this call-and-response means that the context of architecture is actually human dialogue, momentary discourse and understanding? Perhaps architecture’s slogan could be “Misery loves company.”
From your classes, those in which you still read books, you remember intellectual figures like Mikhail Bakhtin, who told you in The Dialogic Imagination that “the word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer’s direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. Such is the situation in any living dialogue.” Replace “word” with “architecture” and reread. Architecture can be seen as just another “utterance,” a dialogic construction. It is oriented towards a future. Architecture is valued primarily through and because of interest and discourse. This effect is the content: it is the vaporization of an architectural object. Architecture is a social construct, produced through a momentary effect of reflection or pause and conversation. Architecture produces resonance: it rings a bell, holds up a mirror. It is like extreme sports, where hyperbole is the norm and the constant, magnificent struggle against gravity produces startling effects. Suddenly, the very idea that architecture is all about the “problematic” or “predicaments” aggrandizes it into seeming heroic, a superhero among mere buildings.
But architecture is an effect, and effects have no discrete edges; though instigated by objects, they’re non-objective. The effect is the conflation of art and life, momentarily flickering in and out of focus, back and forth until it disappears. What you cannot know, just yet, is that the true nature of architecture is not heroic but pathetic. Like most cultural disciplines, architecture is primarily adjudicated through discourse. Its meaning is fleeting; it is obsessed with the new (even a retrograde new). It needs to be interesting, have some sort of super-presence, or be engaged in the present moment. It is judged by its duration: the better the architecture, the longer it holds your attention, and the longer it is part of the discourse. Architecture is also an affect. Affects are similar to effects, but more concrete, more integrated into the process of production. Affects are “design.” Affects are composition and/or non-composition. Effects occur within post-production. Affects allow for effects. Affected form can produce discourse, which can produce architecture. Inevitably, architectural affects are visibly weird or different or better. Architecture is an estranged difference that resonates. Architecture is revolting. The nature of architecture is that it will evade you. This is the source of its pathos – that it is something built with an unstable foundation upon shifting soil. It is a weak and malleable discipline. But in its insecurity, you will find your problem, over and over, and in these problems, you hope to find an answer.

Architecture is an organizational nightmare par excellence. There are more than enough problems in any given project: your own irrational desires coupled with those foisted upon you by the client and those problems inherent in the construction process: technical requirements, economic constraints, scheduling, social conditions. And within this confused and confusing context, the biggest problem is to make something interesting, something that can hold even your own A.D.D.-addled attention span long enough to establish a node of discourse. Architecture is the attempt to make some sort of momentary sense (alternative) within confusion (reality). The ephemeral effect known as architecture has different grades of strength and a variety of different half-lives, although all architecture eventually degrades back into the general confused context, making it even more confused through the chaotic plurality of stuff.

While deliberating upon the construction of architecture, inevitably you search for reassurance in the university library. You skim through some dusty book by Christopher Alexander, who tells you that architecture is formed from natural pressures and forces from the outside pushing in. In other, perhaps less-dusty books, Peter Eisenman proclaims the counter-position, telling you that architecture is “autonomous,” or designed from the inside out, following the historical determinism of Colin Rowe. Neither position is satisfying. They create greater distance between definitions of the problem. They have their points, but seem too simplistic, too rigid. They confirm that in schools, architecture is domesticated, reduced to a series of edible singularities. “Explain your project in one sentence,” professors taunt you. “Where is your diagram?” Clarity and consistency become architectural mantras. At times, clarity is clarified to the point of absurdity. The diagram is single-minded, even stupid. (At times, its stupidity is also its strength.) It is the product of institutionalized criticism, which has oppressed and fragmented the discipline of architecture, transforming it into an archipelago of simplified singularities and safe havens. Architecture is simultaneously at its best and worst within a school. Its greatness is derived from an intensity of discourse and study; its horrendous-ness from its isolation from the outside world. In school, the irreconcilable differences between words and objects are exacerbated, through the alternating intensities of discussion and production. Words uttered in schools strive to explain and clarify, but unfortunately, objects do not have the same ambition. (“To restore silence is the role of objects,” Samuel Becket, Molloy) The meaning of all objects, especially cultural objects (art and architecture), is under constant negotiation and re-negotiation. The difficulty stems from two competing desires: the disciplinary push towards innovation and progress, tempered by the continual need for the hyper-self-conscious clarification of that experimentation. Discourse within your juried reviews will inevitably be stilted, condensed to fit into the apportioned 15-minute timeslot necessitated by group critiques, where all projects are forced into a singular rationale, usually an operative verb or simplistic formal logic. But if architecture is something that needs to be explained totally and completely, if it operates as a simple advertisement of an idea, if it closes things instead of opening them up, you are not interested. And the problem of architecture school’s distance from practice is nothing compared to the even greater distance between architectural discourse and the general public. You fear that any group that isolates itself from the larger group will eventually become irrelevant. Eventually, the gene pool is reduced. Innovation is reduced, until architecture becomes a provincial boutique profession. Stupidity arises from self-sufficiency. Although disciplinary autonomy has all the benefits of interiority, a clearly defined territory that can be surveyed and maintained, it eventually degrades into unintelligible irrelevant conceited self-satisfaction: that is, into solipsism.

Yet you still wonder why architecture (as opposed to mere buildings) isn’t as common as McDonald’s. Maybe it needs a better marketing campaign or a catchy jingle. Most of your non-architecture friends (the one or two of them) don’t know any architect other than Frank Lloyd Wright or Frank Gehry. (Think about changing your name to Frank.) It seems what is considered architecture is a value judgment and is under constant negotiation, but it is not obvious who determines architecture and how it engages the social realm. You don’t understand whether architecture is determined by a coterie of architects, historians, museums, schools, the culture at large, all of the above or none. It remains a mystery. But whoever “they” are, they are very picky, because architecture is rare and fleeting. This upsets you, as a supporter of the weakling underdog; you want to rescue architecture’s leftovers. But you realize once you have determined architecture is distinct from buildings (and yet still a building), that you have created an irresolvable mess.
Sitting at your desk, nothing is more horrifying than a blank sheet of paper. Like architecture itself, you are confronted with an empty space that needs to be filled or compartmentalized. You wonder how to begin, how to commit to something, anything. It’s paralyzing because, invariably, architecture takes up that very thing architects are supposed to value most: space. Your professors say you are “making space,” but really you are just using it up, obliterating it by filling it with stuff. Your favorite thing about architecture is its capacity to momentarily engage material and structure the world. Your least favorite thing is designing it. Architecture seduces you, yet it is almost as strongly repulsive. One thing that surely makes architecture so revolutionary and so revolting is its design. If buildings were not designed, they could not be so horrible or so interesting. If design is about limiting yourself – if it’s the neurotic desire for a problem, an authority, a context – then, despite all your pathetic attempts at constructing spaces and buildings via various organizational devices ( geometry, typology, language, structure), there is still something personal and arbitrary in it. Even with your best efforts to curb your desires, to make something larger than yourself, you can’t help but enjoy exuberant compositions as things in themselves. (Let’s face it: you’re weak). So you spend half your time in the studio daydreaming of an architecture that is purely technical, where the world would naturally compose itself through a single mathematical formula, or better yet, be non-designed and done with pure efficiency without questions of meaning or appropriateness – architecture as pure technique, “just the facts.” If only you could figure out how to make it. Trying to produce architecture is its own unique problem, especially when you don’t know the playing field well. (You’ll soon find out that almost nobody knows the playing field well; lots of architects just play with themselves.) Sometimes you find yourself redrawing designs of buildings you love. Beautiful images compulsively want to be repeated (think Warhol). All you know is that whatever you do, you don’t want to be called idiosyncratic, which is the worst architectural insult: like wearing a beret and calling yourself an “artiste”, it appears grossly pompous. You will eventually realize that this is what your anxiety-ridden “problem” could be good for; you need to find a problem or methodology or technique that is smarter than you. Then this problem becomes what you use and compulsively repeat, instead of something that is already past, and it serves as your creative device. (Potential problems could be found within formal logics or abstract organizational systems or processes or essentially anything that structures your work.) It’s very hard to make something brilliant, but much easier to stumble upon it – and you can only stumble upon it if you give yourself something to trip over.

Seemingly, the problem of architecture begins with the imperative to eradicate yourself, or at least exile yourself, by establishing this overarching authority: the problem that engulfs and unifies all the other problems, something that operates simultaneously with physical space, the context of culture and the index of history. This is part of the masochistic impulse that governs the architecture profession (the forced submission of students, the process of internship, the power of clients and their capital, the persistent reminders that there are maybe five first-rate architects in the profession, the delayed gratification as expressed in the innumerable times you’ve heard the phrase “You’re not really an architect until you’re 50”). You, even though you’re trying not to be you, think that the professional necessity to suppress yourself (the innate human need to establish social order, language, organization, systems and networks) is due to the fact that each of us is stranded inside our own head (refer to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Descartes’ Meditations). The way to subvert the implosion of solipsism, this seemingly unbridgeable interiority, is to argue against yourself, against a singular identity and against singularity. “I” cannot be established without others. The subversion of solipsism comes by expanding yourself, conceptually or literally, and by becoming a professional polyglot, wide and sprawling like the Internet. Architects should specialize in being generalists. Architecture is not a hermetic singularity. To borrow Charles Baudelaire’s term, architecture is actually a dédoublement, a sudden escape from one’s conception of oneself, from one’s guiding “problem.” Dédoublement can result from seeing oneself in a mirror, the self-conscious attempt to understand oneself objectively. Your so-called Constructivist sympathies are revealed in your search to understand the world objectively and materially. The search is about establishing an architecture that has a formal authenticity to the present, an appropriate model of organization, or unity. (This unifier could range from entropic chaos to historical determinism.) Flipping through your architectural history textbooks, the images appear organic, as buildings appear like Ernst Haeckel drawings, ephemeral, unfolding and flourishing like a Busby Berkley production with the beautiful figments of organizational patterns.

After the extensive research and many attempts to explain architecture, its core remains unidentifiable. Staggering backwards in order to find a beginning, you come across the work of the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides, noted for establishing both the dialectic and metaphysics. These two things interest you. Parmenides established that reality itself is both a thinking thing and the object of its own thinking. Upon reading this, you substitute “reality” with “architecture,” and with this revelation, architecture appears to be a self-conscious reflexive system that seems to represent itself. But soon this realization leaves you feeling a little hollow. You sign up for every theory-history class possible, searching for your problem and answer. Extensive and excruciating deliberation about what architecture represents in various darkened rooms lit solely by grainy pixelated projected Powerpoint presentations reveals that the primary terms of architectural discussion are based on “signification” and pseudo-psychoanalysis, which forces architecture to lie on the couch, while asking it about its mother. Secretly you know that all this kvetching is about the hopeless search for meaning and purpose. When reading your assignments at night, you find yourself flipping to other pages in the book, where architects tell you their opinion about their problems in text after text. You quickly realize that architects shouldn’t write essays explaining their architecture, that 98 percent of architects appear completely delusional. The other 2 percent seem criminally insane. You conclude that being at least somewhat delusional is a prerequisite to being an architect. And you’re reminded of a quote that was attached to some recent spam. (“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw, “Maxims for Revolutionists,” 1903)

Your survival instincts tell you to nod knowingly, pretend to understand the significance of architectural theory, and smile and say “Amen!” Sit in awe while your more advanced classmates say things like “Architecture is the dislocation of institutional language towards an autonomous object of site-specific excavation.” Architecture makes little sense. Terms like “semiotics,” “structuralism,” “post-structuralism,” and “post-modernism” become all too familiar, but their meaning escapes you. You spend too much time with endless pages of horribly dense texts, which are built like linguistic obstacle courses placed upon minefields. You scratch your head and wonder how sentences evolved to such length. As if writing about language were destined for obfuscation. Your architectural theory courses focus on the study of linguistics, where you read Saussure’s account of the location of an individual work in language: the word, Saussure maintains, is nothing in itself; it lacks all the properties of the entity, rather, the word is constituted “diacritically” – in other words, words are distinguished in relation to their surrounding context. Maybe you should work on producing a new context, which would necessitate a new architecture. If you could produce architecture from a context outside the specifics of architecture (art historical, literary, social, scientific, anything), then working from this other-context could produce an other-architecture.

What does linguistic meaning have to do with the formal makeup of architecture? Is not linguistics one system, and form and shape another? You are confused as to how they’ve become interrelated and synonymous. The systems are completely different. Form does not produce the same range of effects as words. Of course, forms are superior to words. You think that if architecture is a language, it is so through its instability, its ability to change through its social construction. (Even thinking about the construction of language as you are writing, or the supposed language of architecture as you are designing, produces all sorts of paralyzing neuroses.) There isn’t some sort of absolute stability to language (think Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations). The formlessness of language is what interests you. Architecture is like Wittgenstein’s description of language: “Meaning is just use.” (In other words, we don’t define words by their reference to things but by the way they are used.) A word needs an index, a lexicon, a playing field. New words make new fields, as architectural utterances project potential future contexts. (Buildings are reproductive organisms, intending to produce their own context. All buildings are prototypes for potential cities.) These fields produce their own internal gravities and values. Pierre Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production describes cultural production as a complex, self-regulating field of competing forces. This seems to confirm that architecture has its own field of relationships, its own formal systems; it is somehow both autonomous and not, amorphous like language. After reading Bourdieu, it is the amorphous struggle of architecture that seems relevant. Architecture is a martial art. You become enamored with the following excerpt from a local martial-arts brochure titled Soft Fist: “Instead of opposing force with force, we teach you how to complete your opponent’s movement by accepting his flow of energy as he aims it, thus defeating him by utilizing his own force.” On the back is a badly drawn cartoon of an old Chinese kung-fu master with a long white beard saying, “To know your opponent is to know yourself.” Perhaps the martial-art model of architecture will provide you a way out of a hermetic model of language.
Your required reading in history provides you an alternative to language, though not a more hopeful one. The assigned writings of Manfredo Tafuri remind you that, whether or not you are depressed about the state of architecture yet, you should be. You’re told that to become an architect is to be exiled to obscurity. Maybe this finally explains why your professors seem so frantic and upset all the time. Maybe architecture schools should be labeled with a Surgeon General’s warning. (Warning: If you eventually become an architect, you should know that most people will not like you. They will not appreciate or understand what you do; certainly your family will not. Of course, they will pretend to understand, nodding and smiling just enough so as not to hurt your feelings.) You have always wondered why an estimated 83 percent of all architects wear funereal garb: monochromatic black outfits with the burden of heavy glasses. Why can’t they look a little sportier, more upbeat? Architecture’s self-imposed exile has made it a navel-gazing boutique profession, and despite your best efforts, eventually you give in, put on your heavy plastic glasses, look downward and read. At first, architecture’s obscurity seems reasonable, considering that a popular architect is about as popular as the TV weatherman, and about as prescient. You read more. Tafuri tells you that the avant-garde utopian program of Modernism was defeated. This declaration surprises you, as you set your Diet Coke upon Dwell’s “Affordable Prefab Modern Housing!” issue, which sits upon your Mies van der Rohe catalogue on your Ikea knockoff of an Eames chair. As if anything were so singular and easy to define in the first place. After all, architecture seems alive and well, at least in the magazines, newsgroups, and websites you follow. Was/is the Modernist avant-garde really completely dependent upon Marxism? Probably not. Perhaps there are other forms of capital more important than money (Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital”). Tafuri’s depiction of architecture reminds you of John Barth’s “Literature of exhaustion,” the death knell of meaning and the “used-upness” of possibilities from the realist tradition. To your surprise, before you’ve even begun to find your problem, architecture has been transformed into an exhausted, meaningless language, a language that speaks only to itself: art for art’s sake.

Your inner pragmatist loses interest in the limits of language and solipsism; you’d rather defer the difficult questions of meaning, preferring to understand the limitations of form through methodologies of construction and representation. Maybe the problem you have been searching for is far more practical than theoretical. Perhaps your high school teacher wasn’t wrong when she told you that architecture is a tug-of-war between Art and Science. All new forms of architecture require new methods of construction, new technologies, or new materials. (New forms can also arrive from new methods of representation, but your inner pragmatist thinks that this seems somewhat disengaged from reality.) So, you sign up for every CAD/CAM class offered under the moniker of “mass-customization,” hoping that you might harness this technology. You’re told that the future will tame technology through a variety of three-letter acronyms. Optimistically, you volunteer for a group project that promises to give the architect unprecedented control. Architecture is the “ghost in the machine.”

You soon find out that the techno-utopian impulses of architecture are hard fought, forcing masochistic architects and students to become their own little cottage industry, to become their own volunteer Nike sweatshop. This self-prophesized forward-thinking architecture – architecture written in the future tense – is ultimately trapped in the present with all of the current problems of technology and prejudices of construction. Technology, when devised as an escape and liberator of authorship, human work or a mechanistic-induced technological utopia, can quickly become an overbearing torture device. Technology is liberating, but just as limiting. You think of the American folktale of John Henry – “the steel driving man” – who was in competition against the steam drill, against technology. He barely won, only to have his heart burst. Likewise, certain species of Modernism relied upon industry and mass production, as those architects naively or egotistically thought they could control and harvest burgeoning technology towards making a new world, a better built environment. In the end, it seems that the architects were usurped by technology itself, that they were ultimately inefficient and unnecessary to achieve Modernism’s goals. Architects have value-engineered themselves out of the process, like that cliché moment in sci-fi films such as 2001:A Space Odyssey, Terminator, or The Matrix, when the computer realizes that humans aren’t necessary anymore. Architecture’s embrace of technology is the naive hope that it will empower architects to race against developers and contractors, to create “customized” buildings for the masses. Strangely, anti-standardization (i.e., architecture) has the exact goals of mass standardization: a technically innovative product available to everyone, cheaper and at a higher quality. To produce an architecture that is appropriately new, you need to use new technologies, new materials and new modes of representation, while remembering that you are entering into an amazingly tiresome process that may destroy you. Humans (like architects) are soft and inefficient regarding mechanical progress. In the realm of technology or even pure technique, architects are obsolete and unnecessary. They get in the way: even if you could keep up with the technology, eventually your malformed suction pump of a heart would burst.

After losing absolute confidence in technology as a way out, you play the pragmatist and realize that nobody talks about money in school. “So, how much do you think that’ll cost?” never comes up on a review. This bothers you. Your high-priced, seemingly insignificant and sometimes exuberant freedom from money will foster neuroses once you abruptly enter the world of Capital, where you are plagued with the realization that while at times architecture is the mere decoration of the rich, other times it appears to be the idolatry of the faithful- those heretical few that pray to their architectural deities. The architecture of magazines appears to be the production of overpriced symbols for taste and/or intelligence. Nobody talks about righteous social agendas, and those who do come across as hippies, destined to be poor, living in rusty vans. However, you can’t help but think that if the discipline of architecture is socially irresponsible, its irresponsibility is nothing compared to the misanthropic endeavors of developers and contractors. For better or worse, architecture is a weak force in the field of cultural production. Architecture represents less than 1 percent of the cheaply constructed suburban/urban junkyards that are growing at a dizzying rate, which increasingly seem to represent the economic bar graphs from which they’re derived. How can a world of inflated profit margins foster architecture? You’ll become even more perplexed when someday you look to purchase a house and gasp at the over-priced world of real estate, which is badly constructed with cheap materials, while strangely nobody seems to care. Thought: What if architecture (like Lewis Hyde’s description of art in The Gift, or Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, which preceded it) operates within parallel alternate economies, like parallel universes: Universe One, a building/market economy; Universe Two, a gift economy. “I’ll pick Door Number Two, Bob.” Architecture has to be more than a good investment, or an elegantly constructed Excel spreadsheet with large surplus numbers at the bottom. Architecture is a gift whose value cannot be easily absorbed into the market, and even when it is completely absorbed into the market, its value is not a purely monetary one. Ninety percent of the time, art and architecture are bad economic investments, despite the rhetoric. Architects should operate by awkwardly straddling two economies. Most of the young architects you’ve befriended (granted, you hang with a particularly tragic group) literally pay for parts of their projects, or they do hard labor constructing parts for no money just to have the opportunity to experiment or do something unconventional. It’s obvious that decent architects don’t do their work for the money. The amount of personal sacrifice architects are willing to make for their work is borderline insane and confirms the pathos of the whole endeavor. It is a troubling profession both because architects are willing to subject themselves to it and because culture at large does not appreciate or pay for it. The inevitable question is: Whom does architecture benefit? Is it egotistical or selfless? You suspect the answer could be: “it depends” or at least it fluctuates between the two. (For whom did Picasso paint? For whom did Bach compose? Who benefited from their work? They may have been egomaniacs, but they didn’t do it purely for themselves, and regardless, we’re better off. You think all the arts essentially benefit the greater good.) Regardless of how awkward you feel saying it; architecture is inevitably a humanist project. It has a logic, which is not logic. It is neither purely rational nor mechanical, even though you know this realization will make some people cringe. And as architecture attempts to solve problems, it continues to create new ones. The “problem” of architecture is all of its problems; it is a chimera that can’t be pinned down or contained in any reductive logic or simplified singularity. Architecture is the hapless act of defining a problem of architecture. You decide architecture is a form of continual resistance even from itself: an art of self-consciousness.

If each generation needs to find its own expression, then it seems each generation could also use its own manifesto, as a sort of galvanizing theme song that people can nod their heads to in unison. You realize this is where you come in, and wonder if there is a formal paradigm for manifesto rhetoric: something reusable, like Mad-Libs, where all you need to do is fill in new pronouns, transitive verbs, demonstrative adjectives and then shout “Viva la revolution!” to instigate change. Temporarily intoxicated with the thought of possible futures, you decide that for a manifesto to work it has to operate at various scales: both socially, as a general call to arms, and personally, as a representation of your makeup. It should be a manifesto that is both personal and universal. It should be short and sweet, a pop anthem. At that moment, the leading choice for a propaganda slogan is “You are what you eat!” which fits perfectly on a T-shirt, embossed as a reminder of your problem in determining an interior and exterior. The thought of producing a manifesto is seductive, especially in the context of a frictionless, supposedly “post-modern” world of plurality where everything appears equal, where things are stultified before they begin but are also given the chance to begin in the first place. A glorious manifesto wouldn’t recover some nostalgic past social revolution or establish some current interpretation of a pre-modern position but create unifying social discourse, establish a small piece of ground to stand on. Ideally it would not be part of anything, neither post- nor pre- nor modern. The idea of even writing a manifesto begs the question of whether architecture can be revolutionary. Or is it only aesthetic? How can you be a beret-wearing, cigar-smoking revolutionary if there isn’t anything to revolt against? Can one revolt against nothing? You shudder at the thought that architecture is just a pretty stage set, an urban prop. You lament over the question of whether architecture has agency. A manifesto could get to the core of your problem. It could produce some small inflection in space, a source of gravity, a point of reference, no matter how fleeting it may be.

Your first attempt at a manifesto is titled “!@#?”. The idea of an inaudible deleted expletive seems perfect; it’s your favorite, but your friends think it’s stupid. You tell them it’s a formerly-known-as-Prince thing, which convinces no one. The second attempt is titled “Revolting Architecture,” relishing the double entendre. Once that thrill wears off, you decide the third is the charm by renaming it “P.A.T.H.O.S., Inc.” But that sounds too cynical and/or ironic.

Eventually you decide to scrap the entire endeavor, because you just can’t make your thoughts stick together into a beautifully constructed whole. You think maybe you should write your bildungsroman, something useful like a survival guide or Cliff Notes or an introspective user’s guide or something closer to Rousseau’s Confessions. But how could anyone possibly represent the recursive self-conscious mess of architecture? In the end, all you’re left with are your pathetic “Notes for those beginning the discipline of architecture,” despite your hatred of the lazy disjointed T.S. Eliot mentality, where nothing can be connected with nothing. In your paradoxically so-called American transcendentalist/pragmatist way, you think everything is connected. Architecture is perhaps the most complex organizational balancing act you’ve run into. And once you’ve begun, you realize design is a recursive act without limits, which it is impossible to know when to stop. It radiates order. But like so much other work, you wonder if you’ll really end up continuing on with architecture. You worry about devoting your life to staring into the dull mirror of a computer screen, trying to divine the future. Is it worth it? Architecture is the construction of our own cage. Architecture is the self-conscious construction of the “real” world, (not of a reality TV show). Architecture is a figment, a nervous system, literally and figuratively. As you flip through your cryptic, variegated, and spotty “Notes,” you are reminded that architecture is under constant negotiation as the most socially engaged art form in the field of cultural production, which explains why you think architecture is the public display of our self-consciousness. It is our shiny node of dialogue scattered among innumerable buildings, providing an alternative, a prototype for something else. And every prototype projects the intent of reproducing itself in the future. If, as William Gibson suggests, “the future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed,” then architecture is the concentration of potential futures produced here and now, which means architecture is suspended awkwardly in between time and place. Somehow it is both out of place and time, and in time and place. Architecture is written in the future-present tense. It is through this dislocation and dependence, which allows architecture to achieve nobility through its pathetic nature, that its isolation produces discourse. Architecture is the human condition made material and just as temporary, as architects continue to put words in the mouths of buildings in order to hear them speak. Architecture is the recursive production of voids within a void. It is both concrete and elusive. It is both real and an effect, a constructed figment. As you continue studying, all of your notes and thoughts about architecture will at times become a burden, seeming too heavy as they taunt and paralyze you, and that’s when you decide it is better to try to avoid producing architecture. Try to forget architecture. Although impossible, attempt to suspend your Cartesian doubt and stultifying, self-conscious criticality, because it is helping nobody. Despite yourself, remain optimistic with all the possibilities. Good luck. I’m glad I’m not you, I think.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, David Fenster, David Nordstrom, Jaron Lubin

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Pavilion No. 2, MoMA PS1 YAP, A Net

Long Island City, New York, 2004

A net is an open-meshed fabric twisted, knotted, or woven together at regular intervals. A net is also an entrapping device. Also, a group of communication stations operating under unified control. We proposed a net that’s all three. Placed over the MoMA PS1 courtyard. Plug-in. Cool off. Catch things.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Kristy Almond, Cecily Eckhardt, Kai Hotson, Sarah Iwata, Lukasz Kos, Liza Stiff
Structural Engineer: Blackwell Engineering Ltd., Toronto: J. David Bowick

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Object No. 2, Mats

Multiple, 2003

Adolf Loos talks about the carpet as a pre-architectural spatial condition. The surface is the wall, the floor, and the roof. “The architect’s general task is to provide a warm and liveable space. Carpets are warm and liveable. He decides for this reason to spread out one carpet on the floor and to hang up four to form the walls.” These carpets are made from pouring silicone into milled Delrin molds. Graphite is mixed in. Something like a bear skin rug. Without the baggage. Cuddly. Or, as one critic noted “The carpet’s irregular forests of protruding ribs… provide DIY massages.”

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample

Ether & Grounded with An Te Liu, Mercer Union Gallery, Toronto, 2004

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House No. 2, Floating

Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada, 2003

A U-shaped island. A masterplan with 5 houses. Repetition. Type. All the same but different, transformed locally. 2 built. 3 unbuilt. Connected by paths. 2 paths. One along the ridge of the U and another that weaves in and out to the water’s edge. Connecting inside and outside. A path goes through the house connecting both sides of the U. A private safe swimming area. You can walk through the house without going inside. It started with a wrong number, a case of mistaken identity. Good clients. Young. Good contractor. Open minded. Physical experiments. Built a lot of components ourselves. Drove it up. 30–40 min boat ride to island. Built a wooden bathtub. Built a sink. Built a weird deck. Made Tiles. Made Handles. Crafted. Cedar plank roof. Vented Rainscreen. Reducing heat gain. All cedar everywhere. Engineered steel moment frame inside. Floating on pontoons. Like a boat. Like a dock. Built by a contractor team of 3 people. Built over the winter, on the ice near the contractor’s house and towed to the island in what felt like slow motion.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Fred Holt, Chad Burke, Ryan Bollom, Forest Fulton, Temple Simpson, Martin Kedzior, Jimenez Lai
Structural Engineer: J. David Bowick, Blackwell Engineering Ltd., Toronto
General Contractor: Kropf Industries, Penfold Construction
Photographer: Florian Holzherr, Raimund Koch

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House No. 1, On A Hill

Honeoye, New York, 2003

A steep slope. A lake. Approach from above. White Roof. Reduces Heat. Saves money. Money matters. Money. Sometimes it seems like the only thing that matters. Cheaper. Faster. 2 symmetrical holes in the roof. One has a skylight. One is open. It passively cools the house. The roof is pitched, stretched parallel to the slope. It looks like a nose. The basement is open to the lake. Transforming a basement into a guest area with light and air and direct access to the lake. Vernacular. Modern. Blank. Basic. Square Entrance. Symmetry. Symmetries. Symmetry looks back at you. A body. A character. A spirit animal. Windows are doors. Doors are windows. The center is planted. A small garden. Shade plants. Rain and Snow pass through the house. Beautiful view. Lucky break. Frustrated designer. We learn everything the hard way. Nobody teaches you about venting a dryer. Nobody teaches you about clients. We are taught Architecture is an art, not a service. It is used. It is for others. They don’t like the same things you do. We learn by making, by listening, by experimenting. People tell you what they need. Houses are demanding. You learn too much about people. People are awful. People are wonderful. Architecture is complicated. The first thing you see when entering the house is the outside.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample
General Contractor: Sandarac Construction

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Object No. 1, K. Ioganson Coat Rack

Wood Sticks and dowels, 2003

We were told a funny story that at the Obmokhu exhibition a few wealthy patrons came and mistook one of Karl Ioganson’s sculptures, a.k.a. spatial constructions, as a coatrack and hung their fur coats on it.  Class struggles and luxury and design always seem to be intertwined.  This coatrack is based on that story. Some stories you can’t tell if they’re funny or sad. Some things begin with misreading.

Project Team: Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample

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