Firm name: CODA
Location: Ithaca and New York, N.Y.
Year founded: 2008
Firm leadership: Caroline O’Donnell
Education: B.Arch., Manchester School of Architecture; M.Arch., Princeton University School of Architecture
Experience: Nettleton Willoughby and Williams, Kees Christiaanse Architects and Planners, Eisenman Architects
Firm size: Three to six
Mission:
We think about architecture as a dialogue with the environment. As a result, the responsive forms that emerge in our design process can be unusual. We often use unconventional materials to help tell this story, such as grilling wood, skateboard waste, plastic chairs, decomposable materials, charred wood, and mirrors. And our projects often react dynamically in real time to changing seasons, users, or programs.
First commission:
Party Wall, the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program Pavilion in Long Island City, Queens, N.Y., in 2013. The project was a 100-foot-long, 40-foot-tall installation made out of skateboard waste and leftover steel that cast a shadow spelling “wall.” The shape of the structure hinted that there was a message to be deciphered, though it was illegible most of the time. It was a reference to Robert Venturi, FAIA, and Denise Scott Brown Hon. FAIA's notion of architecture as a sign, and ties into the historic legacy of signs in the neighborhood.
Favorite project:
Bloodline, a self-consuming grilling pavilion, in Stuttgart, Germany. Through the analysis of the lineage of two existing castles, we proposed a third structure, transforming between a geometrically perfect form, implied by the first castle, and a more asymmetrical and functional “fire-space,” implied by the second. The literal transformation of the pavilion over the summer is enabled by the grillholz (local barbecue wood) façade that is burned as the pavilion is used.
Through its transformative nature and misuse of materials, this pavilion provided important foundations on which many of our following projects are built.
Second favorite project:
Urchin is a small, open-air theater made entirely from 500 white plastic chairs as part of the Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial in Ithaca. The project is a perceptual play between the expectation of architectural exuberance and the reality of the everyday object. Connected by thin rods, the chairs’ features are no longer understood in terms of their use—legs, arms, seat—but in terms of their form and material—spikes, curves, voids.
Questions of material efficiency, reuse, and recycling permeate throughout our work, and in this case the unharmed chairs were demounted, cleaned, and donated to a school in the Gambia.
Origin of firm name:
On one hand, CODA is very straightforward—it stands for Caroline O’Donnell Architecture. However, we like to play with words. “Coda” relates to a code to be deciphered and to the Latin word “cauda,” meaning tail; much of our work references the organism as a model for architecture. Coda is also, of course, a conclusion, a closing remark, but one with its own interest, which perhaps hints at the future.
Your decision to become an architect:
The street that I grew up on in Ireland was always under construction. As a child I played in foundations and half-built houses. I never wanted to do anything else and in many ways, I am still doing just that.
Biggest career leap:
I made several leaps between countries: from Northern Ireland, where I grew up in my teens; to England, where I studied; to Australia, where I did my year out; to the Netherlands, where I worked; and then to the U.S., where I came to go to graduate school.
After working at Eisenman Architects in New York and teaching at The Cooper Union, I founded CODA and began teaching at Cornell.
Greatest design challenge you’ve overcome:
I think the MoMA PS1 project is a massive challenge for every team. The winning entries are ambitious, and there is limited funding and very little time. For us, doing something so big, with a complex structure of steel and water balloons, combined with the physical labor of building the skateboard-waste facade panels ourselves was a massive undertaking.
Greatest mentor:
When I moved to the U.S., I learned something that may have been obvious to everyone educated in this country, but was a new idea for me—that architecture could communicate, that it could “say something.” Peter Eisenman, FAIA, taught me that in studio at Princeton University and I immersed myself in those ideas as I worked for a few years in his office after graduate school. But, as I connected this thinking with my earlier education in bioclimatics, I wondered why the messages that architecture conveyed were always self-referential. I wondered why architecture might not say something about the world outside itself. I have been working on that question since starting CODA, and I have to thank both Peter and my mentors in Manchester, Greg Keeffe and Geoff McKennan, for introducing me to very different modes of thinking that I would later be able to connect.
Advice for your younger self:
Don’t plan: just do what’s interesting and challenging to you.
If I had made plans—and stuck to them—my life would have been much less interesting.
The best advice you have ever received:
Persevere.
Design advice you like to give:
Design is not about objects, it’s about relationships.
Design aggravation:
Buildings that claim to be sustainable, when clearly aesthetics are more important to their designers. Architects need to abandon their aesthetic preconceptions and start reacting to the dynamic environments in which their buildings exist. This will have aesthetic affects, of course, but they will be outside of established norms. I was so aggravated about this that I wrote the book, Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships between Architecture and Site (Routledge, 2015), if you’d like to get into it more.
Your favorite place to get inspired:
Kinnagoe Beach in county Donegal on the north coast of Ireland. I am lucky to have grown up with this and other Irish landscapes around me. These environments are so much more sublime and awe-inspiring than any architecture. They are constantly in flux: the wildness of nature is palpable.
Now I live in Ithaca for much of the year, and the lakes and waterfalls do a good job in keeping up with my high expectations of nature that were established early on.
Someone who inspires you:
I am inspired by the students I teach every day at Cornell (and recently, at Harvard Graduate School of Design). They make me ask myself tough questions about the work, and the practice is constantly being pushed by the academic aspect of my life.
How does your teaching relate to your practice?
Recently I’ve been teaching studios about waste as a resource for architecture, so certainly it ties in. I have also taught studios where we use the animal as a model for architecture, and again, that relates back to my teaching and writing. I think it’s important for students to forge their own paths and focus on what is important to them, so it’s important to listen, and to find a healthy balance.
When I’m not working in architecture, I:
Box and cook, but never at the same time.
What should architects be discussing this year?
The political situation and the multiple urgent socioeconomic and environmental issues facing this country are becoming increasingly present in our lives. We are thinking about the nature of our role, as architects, in engaging with questions of climate change, material depletion, national identity, and so on. How can we draw these issues into contemporary architectural practice and theory so that we can generate new ideas and new worlds rather than simply problem solving?
Essential morning or evening routine:
Don’t forget to put your pants on.
A social media account everyone should follow:
Our website is kept up to date. Or if you must, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
Favorite rule to break:
That architecture has one state of being. Our upcoming book (in collaboration with designer José Ibarra) looks to the werewolf as a new model for architecture—one that is transformative, formally and materially, in response to exterior and interior stimuli.
What are you reading?
I’m reading several books as research for the werewolf book: Jennifer Bonner’s Guide to the Dirty South (Artifice Books on Architecture, 2019), SMAQ’s Giraffes, Telegraphs and Hero of Alexandria[: Urban Design by Narration (Ruby Press, 2016)], Kari Weil’s Thinking Animals: Why Study Animals Now? (Columbia University Press, 2012), Reiser + Umemoto’s Atlas of Novel Tectonics (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) (again), Sanford Kwinter’s Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (MIT Press, 2002).
I’ve also read a lot of Werewolf fiction recently: my favorites are, Clemence Housman’s The Were-Wolf (1896), and the short stories “Wolves Don’t Cry” (1954) by Bruce Elliot and “The Wife’s Story” (1982) by Ursula Le Guin.
This article has been updated since its original publication.
