MOSS
Murray Moss & Franklin Getchell · A Scrapbook

Clippings & anecdotes

Stories the press kept, and stories they tell on themselves.

A scrapbook of moments — re-presented from interviews and profiles, each clipped to its source. The best of it is self-told; neither man has ever needed help being funny.

“We had never been to a grocery store. Ever… We went to Stop & Shop and they have forty-six aisles. We were beside ourselves. And people were looking at us because our mouths were open.”Murray Moss, Upstate Diary
“The apartment we moved out of was in Olympic Tower… and the stove still had the manual inside and stickers on the oven. Not only had this stove not ever been replaced since 1975, it had never been turned on.”Franklin Getchell, Upstate Diary
“When we first arrived and the parade of things got placed in the house, we looked at them and we were so freaked out we immediately left to stay in a hotel. For six months.”Murray Moss, on Torpedo House
“Our objects were looking at us, saying ‘Now what, big shot?’”Murray Moss, Upstate Diary
“I wake up at four and I go downstairs and start to move things around. I’ve discovered how easy it is when you drag things on a towel. All those years I never actually needed an installer.”Murray Moss, Upstate Diary
“I want you to go out there a chorus boy, but come back a star.”The best advice Murray ever received
“Never take NO for an answer. And I haven’t. You shouldn’t either…”Franklin Getchell
Achille Castiglioni sent Murray a self-portrait holding the Hoberman Sphere Murray had mailed him for Christmas, inscribed in ink: “Viva Achille Viva Moss.”Murray's greatest professional compliment

Cuttings

  1. The naked man in the Droog shower.MOSS parties were legend — crowds spilling onto Greene Street "Studio 54–style," including one opening featuring, per Architectural Digest, "a saucy young gentleman, fully naked, in a Droog shower." [AD, 2018]
  2. Rejected as too disruptive; given 15,000 square feet instead.The first Design Miami/ gallery committee declined MOSS for fear they'd be disruptive. Craig Robins offered them a huge off-site ground floor nearby — which became a second center of gravity at the fair. "The Committee's concern was proven wildly correct." [Design Miami/]
  3. The Tupperware Party as business model.Asked where a new collector should start, Murray answered: study Tupperware (est. 1946). It addressed function, price, and aesthetic equally — and crucially designed its own presentation. "The Tupperware Party was, for me, an important part of the model for MOSS." [Design Miami/]
  4. The pickle jar x-ray tube.The object that started it all: his father mounted an x-ray tube from his own manufacturing business on a pickle-jar lid and signed it — turning machinery into Art. "This split screen… did in fact have a profound effect on how I saw both function and form." [Design Miami/]
  5. Torpedo House.Named for the Yale physicist-inventor of the homing torpedo who once lived there. Fifty-two doors; architect Alice Washburn built eighty-plus Hamden houses before the Depression erased her from the record. Murray calls her architecture "fairy-tale" — free from the school of how things should be. He wants to document her whole story. [Upstate Diary] · [1stDibs]
  6. The Suicide Suite.Their guest room — their first ever — hung with vintage annotated press photographs of suicides, part of the couple's collection of newspaper-kept prints that have become, through reuse and annotation, "complex works of art." Only a limited number can be shown at once. [Upstate Diary]
  7. "Most hated objects."Murray deliberately collects what visitors love to hate — currently '70s brutalist stoneware ("People volunteer their opinion. They can't wait to tell me how much they hate it") alongside beloved Nymphenburg porcelain. [Upstate Diary]
  8. Snow White's residence, listed on Zillow.What sold them on the house wasn't the diamond-pane windows or fifty wood-panel portals — "what instantly made it 'ours' was the fact that it is painted a lovely red. Not fire-engine red. But toasty-orange red." This site's accent color is that red. [1stDibs]
  9. The wedding registry rite of passage.Critic Alexandra Lange window-shopped MOSS more than any SoHo fashion boutique: "it felt like a rite of passage when I finally registered at MOSS for my wedding." [Design Miami/]
  10. The Chelsea Hotel contamination strategy.For a Campana collaboration, MOSS put the brothers up at the famous Chelsea Hotel "in order to contaminate us with the crazy atmosphere of New York from the 60s and 70s. It was fantastic!" [Humberto Campana]
  11. RISD comes to Torpedo House.Rhode Island School of Design buses students to Connecticut to study how Murray curates his own living room — juxtaposition as pedagogy, brain science included. Neighbors now drop by just to see what's been moved. [Upstate Diary]
  12. KAWS, early."I'm very aware of KAWS and how his career is zooming. We offered his work when he was designing for Kid Robot." Seeing COMPANION float in Hong Kong's harbor years later was, Franklin says, "hugely satisfying." [Franklin Getchell, Design Miami/]