We are modem

Kathryn Moll and Nicholas de Monchaux collaborate as modem, combining their experience in software, architecture, urban design, and digital fabrication.

PO Box 391142
Cambridge, MA 02139

Using architectural tools, codes, and crafted artefacts, we explore improbable narratives for urban situations and ecologies.

Kathryn Moll is a licensed architect with a decade of experience leading the design and construction of net-positive energy buildings and award-winning adaptive-reuse projects. She is a California native whose fascination with public processes, education, and systems of engagement motivate her work, both on buildings and the forces that shape them.

We work upstream and downstream from traditional architectural practice.

Nicholas de Monchaux thinks and writes about architecture, territory, technology and politics, and is Professor and Head of Architecture at MIT. He is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011) and Local Code: 3,659 Proposals on Data, Design and the Nature of Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016). His fascination with the intersection of natural and man-made systems traces back to his youth, growing up on Sydney Harbor.

+

The things we make are not buildings in the traditional sense. They are scenarios and settings for performance. They span the rooms of a gallery and the wider, wilder realms of urban space. They may be technologies or systems for making objects, or they may be objects that drive toward the essence of a single idea. They provoke narratives at different scales, and test boundaries between artistic control and individual autonomy. The things we make can be both strange and beautiful, and appeal to all the senses (not least of all a sense of humor).