Scale ranks high among architecture’s practical and theoretical concerns: centuries of architectural theory have debated the beautiful, harmonious, and proper scales of all manner of designed things. Ironically, the utter obviousness of scale has meant that it is mostly left unmentioned today, its absence in writing on MOS Architects (Hilary Sample and Michael Meredith), being no exception. Most often treated as a fixed category, scale is typically invoked as a shorthand for identifying the relative size of various projects, say, the domestic or the urban. But scale and its manipulation should be recognized as one of MOS’s most persistent preoccupations because this latent theme is one aspect that differentiates the office from other architectural practices that deal in scale—which is, of course, all architects.
Italian architect Ernesto Rogers once quipped that he wished to design everything from “a spoon to a city.” To date, MOS has designed several cities but no spoon. (Your move, Alessi!) Their smallest objects are fittings for domestic life: coat hooks, candles, and soap dishes. Each comprises a simple form in either metal, wax, or wood, their shapes so abstract as to seem purely sculptural. Recent furniture pieces are more complex, made to accommodate the form and bulk of the human body. In Model Furniture, MOS mobilizes the papercraft miniatures of their dollhouse-like architectural maquettes as the basis for full-sized furnishings. Trading paper for polished sheet metal, the chairs, stools, and tables combine the slick sheen of minimalist furniture with the endearing imperfections of handmade models: the pieces bear wonky legs and off-kilter joints. (Think drunken Donald Judd.)
After the representational games of Model Furniture, a suite of new furniture pieces for Brussels-based gallery Maniera explored the fluidity of scale more directly. One piece from that collection, Objects of One Part (No. 3), is a modular system of identical components. Each part is a circular metal plate, roughly eighteen inches in diameter, with a ninety-degree fold located four inches from its edge. Bolting components together causes the object to change size and function, and consequently, to shift its scale: one part is a shelf (for objects), four make a stool (for a person), six are a coffee table (for a room), and so on. In sum: Parts: one; objects: many; scale: infinite.
A number of MOS’s furniture designs found a good home in an apartment renovation they recently completed in New York. Occupying the top floor of a pre-war building near Washington Square Park, the skylit loft space is a subtle foil to the eye-catching things it contains. A palette of plain materials—white walls, wide-plank wood floors, honey-colored plywood for cabinetry and bookshelves—forms a low-key textural backdrop to the client’s collection of art, books, and MOS-designed furniture, which includes a circular daybed, dining set, and bar stools. The architects turned visual noise down to a whisper by all but eliminating many of the smallest interfaces of domestic living. There are no visible handles installed on the kitchen millwork, power outlets are nearly-invisible ports embedded in the wall, and air conditioning vents are recast as tidy grids of circular holes easily mistaken for abstract art.
The majority of the office’s built architecture falls in the range of the small, freestanding building: artist studio, single-family house, open-air pavilion. House No. 10 is one such project. Completed in 2019, it features many of the practice’s furniture designs, and appropriately, it too is an exercise in aggregating self-same pieces. Like Objects of One Part (No 3) the house comprises identical elements, five gable-roofed wings of equal width, or as the architects describe them, “five house-shaped extrusions.” At the center of the plan, where the wings should collide in a geometric mishmash, a perfectly-square courtyard has been bluntly excavated like stone from a quarry. The cut-out courtyard turns the building into an architectural oddity and a groan-worthy pun: a part-to-whole building that is actually a part-to-hole building. Another sense of unity is produced by the house’s all-over metal cladding, which was delivered to the build in coils and installed on site. The external sheathing echoes the metal furniture within. The result delivers a patently ambiguous impression of its scale, oscillating between a tiny village of five separate houses clustered around a rainwater-fed vegetable and herb garden, or a single residence branching out in all directions.
The newest projects are also some of MOS’s largest, although relatively speaking, Winery No. 1 is a small facility. From outside, the structure will appear as four walls cascading down a sloped site over three earthen terraces. But the building is an iceberg: there is much more under the surface than meets the eye. In section, the structure is a three-level ziggurat embedded in the earth like a partially-excavated ruin. Above ground, the walls appear unabashedly infrastructural, their concrete expanses modestly unadorned and uninterrupted but for broad, plate-glass windows which admit light to the internal tasting rooms and production spaces. On the one hand, the structure couldn’t be more straightforward; on the other, the discrepancy between the building’s apparent scale above ground and its actual size is an extraordinarily sophisticated effect. The architects’ manipulation of perceived scale minimizes the building’s apparent impact on the site.
Their earliest urban projects are hypothetical experiments, like Housing No. 1 Thoughts on a Walking City, MOS’s contribution to the 2012 exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream at the Museum of Modern Art. The proposal imagines a paradigm for urban development in which suburban streets give way to continuous networks of low-rise housing blocks—simultaneously densifying areas of sprawl and evicting the automobile. The drawings reveal the logic of their scheme with extreme lucidity: a city composed from an aggregation of parts whose relations are tightly intertwined. The individual, the household, the apartment, the four-story block, the street, the neighborhood, the district, and the region are redefined as a set of telescoping scales, each linked to and informing the other. A series of immersive drawings depict the intended effect in almost poetic fashion: life, objects, architecture, and environment commingle in varied and organic ways. The size of a “Walking City” is indeterminate—potentially endless—but its scalar matrix is tightly calibrated.
The architects now have a chance to return to those ideas a little more than a decade later. Housing No. 16, in Asuncion, Paraguay, is a series of housing blocks to be built in La Chacarita, one of the country’s poorest districts. MOS’s proposal replicates the tight grain of the extant urban fabric by replacing ad hoc buildings with compact, low-rise towers of earthen construction; workers will be trained in the method on site. About a dozen locations in the district will host clusters of this building type: three- or four-stories tall, with a mix of units for small and large households. On each site, the towers are positioned to provide shade at ground level, and to capture breezes on the upper floors for cross-ventilation in the tropical climate. Housing No. 16 proposes an innovative combination of small-scale construction and high-density urbanism in La Chacarita not because it is a universally appropriate approach, but because the situation itself dictates the appropriate scales of intervention.
Modern architects of the twentieth century were convinced that the challenges of design at all scales—from spoons to cities—would be solved by a universal set of principles. The crisis of the industrial city, for instance, was infamously answered by calls for the construction of sky-high housing towers poised on green lawns. That paradigm failed in every instance because the size of the architect’s solution matched only the magnitude of the problem, disregarding the many smaller scales at which life actually takes place. Today, scale is a worthwhile project because it is no longer a debate about relations among objects, but a question of how design stages relations between people, materials, spaces, communities, environments, the world.
