Unconventional Practices

Architecture is a discipline and a practice that can be radically inclusive. It’s work is to attempt to move things forward. As a practice, we’re interested in unconventional ways of working. Through a focus on institutional, educational, collective residential buildings, and public spaces, design focuses on culture and experiences. How does working within a select set of things produce a practice? How might it produce culture? How does practice engage design and a range of audiences? As architecture intersects each kind of project and space, how is culture produced? This talk presents select architecture and design work of mos, from books to buildings alongside a set of questions about design and making a contemporary unconventional practice.

Hilary Sample is an architect based in New York City. With Michael Meredith, she co-founded the internationally acclaimed studio mos. Her work focuses on the creation of cultural and educational spaces within vacant spaces, through collective housing, schools, community centers, galleries, and public art installations. She is the recipient of the 2010 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, The Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in 2015, The Architectural League of New York Emerging Voices in 2008, 2020 United States Artists Award, and the 2023 American Academy in Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture. In 2018, with her studio mos, she led the masterplan design, design of the educational building, and curation of the Laboratorio di Vivenda in Mexico, the Krabbesholm Four Studios in Denmark, Petit École in Versailles, and a series of collective housing residential buildings in Washington D.C., and in Asunción, Paraguay; and a greenhouse / clinic for the Guangzhou Triennial. Hilary is a Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and holds the inaugural IDC Foundation Professorship in housing design and culture.