Element House in New Mexico by MOS Architects

A pair of New York architects, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample, designed a visitor center with a guest house in the middle of the desert, approximately 200 kilometers east of Albuquerque in the U.S. state of New Mexico. This center serves the needs of the land art museum 'Star Axis', which has been shaped under the open landscape since 1975 by the trained mathematician and sculptor Charles Ross. The visitor center project by New York's MOS Architects is called 'Element House' and consists of silvery insulating panels resembling cold storage. The irregular layout is composed of prefabricated modules that were brought to the site. The resulting composition consists of archetypal houses with prominent facades, saddle roofs, and oversized chimneys serving natural ventilation and diffuse lighting.
Its shape resembles the urbanism of a grown village. However, the floor plan is based on the precisely defined Fibonacci infinite sequence of natural numbers, where two preceding numbers are added. This simple principle underlies a range of complex shapes in both the plant and animal worlds. Each added module deviates from the center but still remains a cohesive whole. The house lacks main or side facades, just as it does not have a main entrance. Energy self-sufficiency was taken into account in the design, addressed by solar collectors. Besides its functional role as a visitor center and guest house, the building is also an exhibit, and its drawing documentation has been acquired by New York's MoMA for its collections. The studio of Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample has been on MoMA's radar for a long time, as they won the prestigious YAP in 2009 and implemented their summer pavilion 'afterparty' in the courtyard of P.S.1.

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