MOS Architects

Occasioned by the exhibition Element House: Architecture for a New Ecology at Denver’s Museum of Outdoor Arts, this book tells the story of a prefabricated modular house designed by MOS. Its structure is inspired by the short film The Romance of Systems, in which a looping pan along an apparently endless house accompanies a conversation between two architects. It’s never clear whether they inhabit the house or if the house itself is the subject of their exchange.

Echoing the film’s looping structure, the book is composed of five nested signatures—a book within a book within a book—each mapping to a chapter in the house’s realization. Except for the center-most, each chapter forces the reader to leap over the intervening ones, creating a tactile sense of modularity. The narrative moves from the abstract concept of the house toward its site-specific installation in New Mexico. Wrapped in a drawing of its shingled shell, the book’s stair-stepped octavo signatures echo the building’s segmented form. As an object, the book stands as another representation of the house within the exhibition.