NASA image AS17-148-22727 — the iconic “Blue Marble” — is the apex of one way of envisioning the earth; it may also offer us an important tool to imagine the earth yet to come. ...more

For the 2023 exhibition at MAXXI in Rome, titled “The Future Is Here: New Technologies and Design,” modem created a gallery-length mural in mylar film, highlighting the collaborative efforts of designers, engineers, and scientists in developing the Apollo spacesuit and its responsive design to the human body. ...more

For the 2021 Venice Biennale, modem presents fragments of spacesuit history within objects that are also environments. Cross-hatching the language of reliquary and care, they are an apparatus of protection as much as of display. ...more

Historically, Venice was not confined to the dense network of isole shaped from sandbars in the early Middle Ages and cleaved by the Grand Canal. Rather, it was an interlinked archipelago stretching the length and breadth of the lagoon, in which a variety of innovative, incompatible, or inconvenient functions were diffused. Today, communities in the lagoon and its margins—tourists, residents, and commuters, alike—move separately along highly prescribed routes, yet rarely across the surface of the water that connects them. ...more

Modem designed the installation for Doug Hall's 2-channel video piece, shown at the Rena Bransten Gallery in 2018. A tensile structure allowed a 10-foot cantilevered screen to extend into the gallery, and was paired with an anamorphic projection of the video's second channel onto the gallery walls. ...more

Text—codes, standards, and specifications—shape the form of contemporary buildings in a measure far greater than lines. ...more

For the 2018 exhibition marking the end of Catherine Wagner’s tenure as the Dean of the Arts at Mills College in Oakland, modem collaborated with the artist to create a series of architectural instruments and interventions within the fabric of the Mills College Art Museum. Enabling what Wagner terms ‘Archaeology in Reverse,’ these building-scaled periscopes, filters, furniture and landscapes frame photographs, sculptures, performances, and, above all, the 100-year old architecture of the museum itself. ...more

Modem was part of one of the ten teams selected to participate in the Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge. In this year-long ideas competition, interdisciplinary design teams worked alongside community members to identify critical areas throughout the Bay Area and to propose community-based solutions to strengthen the region’s resilience to sea-level rise, severe storms, flooding and earthquakes. ...more

This map explores the risks and rewards of living in the Bay Area. Modem used custom software tools and a modified IBM Wheelwriter typewriter to imprint aggregated text onto 263 letter-sized pages, juxtaposing quotidien interactions with the density of geological hazards present in the physical landscape. ...more

In 2019, we stepped away from production to study the manifestation of global technological transformations and ecological crises, traveling through China to Kazakhstan, India and Vietnam. ...more

Laura was one entry in a group show of commissioned and functional toy race cars curated by Visionaire World. The cars formed an urban simulation on a large-scale racing track. ...more

In 2017, the McEvoy Foundation in San Francisco commissioned the Kunstwagen, a versatile mobile furniture piece designed for dynamic gallery events. ...more

In a proposal for the American Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, modem, in collaboration with Ron Rael and Virginia San Fratello, explored the migration of architectural ideas, techniques, and practitioners to the United States. ...more

As an invited contribution to the 2015 exhibition Measure, modem’s Nicholas de Monchaux produced a series of alternative facades for the Storefront for Art and Architecture. ...more

This exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago was first developed as an installation for the Oakland Museum of California in 2012. A series of uncannily-scaled furnishings engaged the body of the viewer at a range of intimate scales. ...more

An installation on the San Francisco Local Code Case Study was featured as part of the exhibit The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area, curated by Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher at SFMOMA and shown from March 31 – July 29, 2012. ...more