Michael Meredith

Hilary Sample

Vacant Spaces NY begins gathering the incomplete data available and documenting vacant spaces in New York City. Organized from large to small, general to specific, vacancy in the United States to case studies of specific vacancies in Manhattan, Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, and their architecture studio MOS imagine possibilities for repurposing current vacant spaces in New York City. 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. Vacant Spaces NY 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.

Vacant Spaces NY

In less than a decade, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample have emerged as two of architecture's most daring experimenters. Their New York City-based studio MOS is home to an unusually eclectic band of collaborators for whom new media technologies offer not simply better means of presentation, but rather become the radical tools necessary to create groundbreaking architecture. By exchanging plans and sections for software and film, MOS eschews the static forms of traditional architecture in favor of a working technique that is inventive and playful. Everything All at Once showcases over twenty-five projects on screen and in built form, including the acclaimed thatch-covered structures from the 2009 PS1 After Party and the mylar weather balloon installation at the 2010 Venice Biennale. As aesthetically experimental as the projects it contains, Everything All at Once is a window on the architectural vanguard of today and a vision of the architectural studio of tomorrow.

The Software, Videos, and Architecture of MOS

Everything All at Once

Tatiana Bilbao

The third volume of the series The Architect?s Studio focuses on Tatiana Bilbao?s exploration of the landscape: from the territory of Mexico over the urban to the interior landscape of the individual building, always taking social conditions into account. This is also demonstrated in Bilbao?s various projects such as the architectural design of a pilgrimage route, a botanical garden in the Mexican main trading center Culiacán, and not least the Light of Line, which is intended to enable women in particular to move more safely in remote districts of the city. In constant collaboration with experts from various disciplines, Bilbao wants to create architecture that has a direct impact on its users.00The publication also provides insights into the Mexican cultural, artistic, and building traditions that Bilbao incorporates into her projects. The volume addresses the question of the use of collages in architecture and embeds Bilbao?s work in a contemporary as well as a historical context.00Exhibition: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, Denmark (18.10.2019 - 09.02.2020).

The Architect's Studio

Tatiana Bilbao Estudio

Maintenance plays a crucial role in the production and endurance of architecture, yet architects for the most part treat maintenance with indifference. The discipline of architecture values the image of the new over the lived-in, the photogenic empty and stark building over a messy and labored one. But the fact is: homes need to be cleaned and buildings and cities need to be maintained, and architecture no matter its form cannot escape from such realities. In Maintenance Architecture, Hilary Sample offers an inventive examination of the architectural significance of maintenance through a series of short texts and images about specific buildings, materials, and projects. Although architects have seldom choose to represent maintenance-imagining their work only from conception to realization-artists have long explored subjects of endurance and permanence in iconic architecture. Sample explores a range of art projects-by artists including Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeff Wall, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles-to recast the problem of maintenance for architecture. How might architectural design and discourse change as a building cycle expands to include "post-occupancy"?

Maintenance Architecture

Journey with architects Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample through the history of architecture on their quest to find a perfect home In Houses for Sale, architects Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of MOS Architects invite readers on their family's quest for a new home through the annals of architectural history, exploring details and peculiarities from some of the greatest names in architecture. When they realize that there isn't any one house that suits them perfectly, they decide to design their own. In doing so, Meredith and Sample come to the conclusion that no building is perfect and that architecture is an exciting, ever-evolving project in which the process of bringing a new building to life through design and construction can be even more satisfying than the final product itself.Published in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Houses for Sale is a charming and thoughtful introduction to architecture's varied history, with full-color illustrations and simple text that are suitable for aspiring young designers and experienced architects alike.

Hilary Sample

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