Creators MOS Architects build spaces that remind us how unusual the membrane separating a space from the world around it can be. By pushing the limits of the forms and materials they use to draw the line between inner and outer spaces, MOS Architects create enclaves and enclosures suitable for activities we may not have even yet imagined. For the Venice Biennale, they harnessed a group of silver weather ballons above a courtyard to create a shimmering impermanent pavilion. For their winning entry into the P.S.1 Young Architects Program, Afterparty, they tiled the roofs of a network of anthill like structures with a recycled substance that looked like snuffleupagus fur. Now they’re working on an inflatable factory to house inflatables. “What?!” you say. Read our interview with Michael Meredith of MOS, and all will be revealed.What are you working on right now?
A bunch of small projects and some bigger ones. We're working a project with Tobias Putri, a sculptor, we're doing a temporary cinema in the Wexner Center in Columbus Ohio. It looks like a big pile of grids kind of, it's like a cobweb that's sort of formed into a theatre. We're also working on an orphanage in Nepal, an inflatable factory, a house project in Turkey, a project in New Mexico, and some furniture for a small furniture store in New York, Lerival. We're also contributing to a newspaper for the New Museum. We've signed on to do the obituaries section.That's a fun section.
Yeah, we're going to get to kill people. So, it should be fun.When you say you get to kill people, do you mean you're going to be writing obituaries for artists that are no longer relevant, or are you actually going to be writing obituaries for dead people?
They're not going to be real. They're going to be fake obituaries for architecture and architecture ideas. It's all going to be satire at some level. We're going to create elaborate deaths of things, theories, and people who can handle being made fun of. People who are senior figures in the field. It's really about trying to create a space for something new to come in. Right now everyone feels there's kind of an exhaustion in architecture, so it's the right moment to write obituaries.I guess I could understand why architecture as a profession is exhausting, because you’re building such big things, but why especially exhausted right now?
Architecture is at a place where we can just feel that we're right at the beginning of a moment, but of what we just don't know. It feels like something is over, and something new is coming along. Everyone's hoping that this new thing is going to be really radical and exciting and really change things, but nobody knows what it is yet.Do you think technology has played a role in getting us on that cultural precipice?
I think that everything has become very diffuse. I think media has become very diffuse. I think conversations have become diffuse. I think it's both good and bad. It's exciting. Success in recent years has been sort of a formalism in architecture — you know all the stuff that's happening in China — which is exciting, but everybody is building incredible spectacles of impressionism to such a degree that it feels like it's hard to tell the difference between it all anymore. You know, it's all just so exciting.From a cultural standpoint, we're really over-excited?
It's gotten to the point where it's just boring, all this excitement. We need to be able to talk about things a little more again. I'm totally against the heroic stuff. We do little stuff. We are totally for the pathetic. The mythology of architecture is too much embedded in a kind of big ego. I don't even think it's real, but it's something we're aware of, and we try to do lots of things that are kind of pathetic. I kind of like the pathetic. I don't know what that's all about or where it comes from, maybe it's from watching too many Woody Allen movies or something.You said you’re building an inflatable factory! How does that work?
It's this guy named Harold Warner who's a Canadian inflatable manufacturer, his company's called Dynamic Air Shelters. We met him a few years ago, when we were trying to do an inflatable project in New York actually, for PS1. We didn't get that particular gig, but we kept in contact with him, and then he said, "Hey, I want to do a factory in Newfoundland, Canada." Where he meant in Newfoundland was in a really remote small town called Grand Bank. He wanted something that was close to his existing factory that was like an airplane hanger — because he goes to airplane hangers to inflate his giant inflatable shelters to test them, and it's 3 hours away, and it's incredibly cold and snowy there.What kind of inflatables does he make exactly? I'm picturing intertubes and rafts.
He makes stuff for NGO's in Haiti, and then he does stuff for companies, and for the military to have a place to house troops. Then there's some that he does in places like Africa. He showed me a movie of this, and it really still haunts me. When there's an outbreak he builds these inflatable hospitals and then if one of the patients dies they can basically take the room that the infected patient was in, reverse the inflation, and shrink wrap them so that they're perfectly sealed and the disease won't spread.He sounds like a pretty interesting guy.
He's a really interesting guy. He used to be a hot air balloon world record holder. He's got some stories. The project itself is scheduled to start construction next spring – we were going to try to do it this year but then the frost was such an issue, and we finally got to engineer it. It's taken years to get the engineering right on it – and we've had many failures. We made these big inflatable tubes that we were trying to intersect and they all failed. Finally, we've come up with a way that works. They're big tubes, 2 meters in diameter. And the design we finally came up with is a big series of these tubes that crisscross like a fat basket.What is Mr. Warner like? Just from hearing about his factory, I'm curious.
He's got lots of videos. Like, they do things where they explode inflatables over there. He's hardcore into it. I mean he's an enthusiast. We are just dabblers in his world. He believes every inch of the inflatables. He thinks that we wouldn't have the problem of terrorism if we all lived in inflatables, because explosions – you know he's like – explosions don't kill people, it's the shrapnel, it's the pieces of buildings getting blown to bits, but if we lived in inflatables and a bomb went off, we would just bounce around off the walls and it would be great, just like really fun.Maybe that's where the future is going. Are inflatables the next big thing?
They could be. I definitely think there is something about that kind of nomadic style, the appeal of temporary things. I mean maybe it will go to both extremes. There will be infrastructure, essentially, huge things that cost lots of research to implement, and then there will be things that are very light, simple, and low budget; and then maybe we'll lose the middle.
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A bunch of small projects and some bigger ones. We're working a project with Tobias Putri, a sculptor, we're doing a temporary cinema in the Wexner Center in Columbus Ohio. It looks like a big pile of grids kind of, it's like a cobweb that's sort of formed into a theatre. We're also working on an orphanage in Nepal, an inflatable factory, a house project in Turkey, a project in New Mexico, and some furniture for a small furniture store in New York, Lerival. We're also contributing to a newspaper for the New Museum. We've signed on to do the obituaries section.That's a fun section.
Yeah, we're going to get to kill people. So, it should be fun.When you say you get to kill people, do you mean you're going to be writing obituaries for artists that are no longer relevant, or are you actually going to be writing obituaries for dead people?
They're not going to be real. They're going to be fake obituaries for architecture and architecture ideas. It's all going to be satire at some level. We're going to create elaborate deaths of things, theories, and people who can handle being made fun of. People who are senior figures in the field. It's really about trying to create a space for something new to come in. Right now everyone feels there's kind of an exhaustion in architecture, so it's the right moment to write obituaries.I guess I could understand why architecture as a profession is exhausting, because you’re building such big things, but why especially exhausted right now?
Architecture is at a place where we can just feel that we're right at the beginning of a moment, but of what we just don't know. It feels like something is over, and something new is coming along. Everyone's hoping that this new thing is going to be really radical and exciting and really change things, but nobody knows what it is yet.
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I think that everything has become very diffuse. I think media has become very diffuse. I think conversations have become diffuse. I think it's both good and bad. It's exciting. Success in recent years has been sort of a formalism in architecture — you know all the stuff that's happening in China — which is exciting, but everybody is building incredible spectacles of impressionism to such a degree that it feels like it's hard to tell the difference between it all anymore. You know, it's all just so exciting.From a cultural standpoint, we're really over-excited?
It's gotten to the point where it's just boring, all this excitement. We need to be able to talk about things a little more again. I'm totally against the heroic stuff. We do little stuff. We are totally for the pathetic. The mythology of architecture is too much embedded in a kind of big ego. I don't even think it's real, but it's something we're aware of, and we try to do lots of things that are kind of pathetic. I kind of like the pathetic. I don't know what that's all about or where it comes from, maybe it's from watching too many Woody Allen movies or something.You said you’re building an inflatable factory! How does that work?
It's this guy named Harold Warner who's a Canadian inflatable manufacturer, his company's called Dynamic Air Shelters. We met him a few years ago, when we were trying to do an inflatable project in New York actually, for PS1. We didn't get that particular gig, but we kept in contact with him, and then he said, "Hey, I want to do a factory in Newfoundland, Canada." Where he meant in Newfoundland was in a really remote small town called Grand Bank. He wanted something that was close to his existing factory that was like an airplane hanger — because he goes to airplane hangers to inflate his giant inflatable shelters to test them, and it's 3 hours away, and it's incredibly cold and snowy there.What kind of inflatables does he make exactly? I'm picturing intertubes and rafts.
He makes stuff for NGO's in Haiti, and then he does stuff for companies, and for the military to have a place to house troops. Then there's some that he does in places like Africa. He showed me a movie of this, and it really still haunts me. When there's an outbreak he builds these inflatable hospitals and then if one of the patients dies they can basically take the room that the infected patient was in, reverse the inflation, and shrink wrap them so that they're perfectly sealed and the disease won't spread.He sounds like a pretty interesting guy.
He's a really interesting guy. He used to be a hot air balloon world record holder. He's got some stories. The project itself is scheduled to start construction next spring – we were going to try to do it this year but then the frost was such an issue, and we finally got to engineer it. It's taken years to get the engineering right on it – and we've had many failures. We made these big inflatable tubes that we were trying to intersect and they all failed. Finally, we've come up with a way that works. They're big tubes, 2 meters in diameter. And the design we finally came up with is a big series of these tubes that crisscross like a fat basket.What is Mr. Warner like? Just from hearing about his factory, I'm curious.
He's got lots of videos. Like, they do things where they explode inflatables over there. He's hardcore into it. I mean he's an enthusiast. We are just dabblers in his world. He believes every inch of the inflatables. He thinks that we wouldn't have the problem of terrorism if we all lived in inflatables, because explosions – you know he's like – explosions don't kill people, it's the shrapnel, it's the pieces of buildings getting blown to bits, but if we lived in inflatables and a bomb went off, we would just bounce around off the walls and it would be great, just like really fun.Maybe that's where the future is going. Are inflatables the next big thing?
They could be. I definitely think there is something about that kind of nomadic style, the appeal of temporary things. I mean maybe it will go to both extremes. There will be infrastructure, essentially, huge things that cost lots of research to implement, and then there will be things that are very light, simple, and low budget; and then maybe we'll lose the middle.