Caroline O'Donnell is an architect, writer, and educator. She is the founder and sole-proprietor of the firm CODA, based in Ithaca, NY, USA. CODA won the PS1 MoMA Young Architects Program in 2013 and built "Party Wall" at PS1 in Long Island City, New York. O’Donnell is the Edgar A. Tafel associate professor of architecture and director of the Master of Architecture Program at Cornell University and visiting associate professor at Harvard GSD in Fall 2018. Her first book "Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships between Architecture and Site," was published in April 2015.
Life and career
O'Donnell was born and raised in Athlone, Ireland and later in Derry, N.Ireland. She received her B.Arch with a specialization in Bioclimatics from the Manchester School of Architecture in England in 2000, winning the Heywood Medal for the most outstanding final year student. She worked with Nettleton Willoughby Williams in Sydney, Australia, from 1997–98 and with KCAP in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, from 2000-2004. She received Master of Architecture from Princeton School of Architecture in 2006, sponsored by the Arts Council of Ireland and the Fonds BKVB in the Netherlands, where she won the Susan.K.Underwood Prize awarded to the graduating M.Arch student demonstrating exceptional ability and talent throughout their studies in Architectural Design. She subsequently worked at Eisenman Architects until 2008, having a lead design role in the Hamburg Library competition, Pompei Santuario Train Station, and others. O’Donnell moved to Ithaca to teach at Cornell University in 2008 and it is there that she founded CODA, an architectural practice that promotes sustainability through a close relationship between architecture and environment. In 2010, she received second prize in Europan 10 competition with Urban Punc., a proposal for urban regeneration for the city of Leisnig, Germany and in 2012, she won first prize in the Europan 11 competition, with the project Counterspace, designed for a site in the Dublin Docklands. In 2013, CODA won the MoMA PS 1 Young Architects Program with the project 'Party Wall' which used the by-product from skateboard manufacturing and leftover steel. as well as the Royal Hibernian Academy’s Arthur Gibney Award for Work with Outstanding Architectural Content. In 2016, CODA’s project ‘Urchin,’ a pavilion made entirely from plastic chairs, was selected to be built for the Cornell Council of the Arts Biennial. Since 2014, O’Donnell has had a collaboration with her partner Martin Miller, under the banner of "OMG". They have collaborated on several projects, including Art Dock, a submission for the Helsinki Guggenheim Museum competition and Rickshow, Street Architecture: Ideas City Pavilion Competition, Storefront for Art and Architecture/New Museum, New York, for which they were finalists. In 2017, OMG opened its first built work: a decomposing pavilion ‘Primitive Hut’ at Art Omi, Ghent. Current OMG projects include Zimmer: a walking house and Evitim: a pavilion made from waste. Alongside OMG, O’Donnell continues to lead CODA with projects such as an art gallery and residence in Dryden, NY, and a mini-library in Buffalo, NY. In 2017, O'Donnell was named one of the world's top 30 female architects by Azure Magazine.
Books
O’Donnell’s first book "Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships between Architecture and Site," was published in April 2015.Niche Tactics aligns architecture's relationship with site with its ecological analogue: the relationship between an organism and its environment. The book of short stories, "This is Not A Wall: Collected Short Stories on CODA's Party Wall at MoMA PS1", edited by Caroline O’Donnell and Steven Chodoriwsky, collects 75 short stories from a diverse range of participants. O’Donnell has also written chapters for several books, including two chapters with Michael Jefferson for the Office US Book 3: Manual and Book 4: New World, as well as a chapter in Giraffes, Telegraphs and Hero of Alexandria, by S.Mueller and A. Quednau. Upcoming books include
Journals
Together with Marc McQuade and Brian Tabolt, O’Donnell co-founded the journal Pidgin at Princeton in 2005. From 2008 to 2017 she was the editor-in-chief of the Cornell Journal of Architecture, publishing issue 8: RE, issue 9: Mathematics: from the Ideal to the Uncertain, and issue 10: Spirits. O’Donnell has contributed essays to several journals including Log, Thresholds, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, Pidgin, and others.
Exhibitions
"Natural Selection" - 3 recent competitions, was exhibited in Milstein Gallery, Cornell, in Ithaca in April 2013. Party Wall was exhibited at MoMA New York in 2013 and at the Royal Hibernian Society, Dublin in 2013. Bloodline, a self-consuming grill pavilion, was exhibited in Tjaden Gallery, Cornell, Ithaca in 2010. O'Donnell's drawing "Missing You" was exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2013 as part of POP: Protocols, Obsessions, Positions. Evitim a exhibition that O'Donnell worked on with Martin Miller, showcases the reuse of waste from another project. Scrap plywood sheets that have been used for a previous project was stitched together to create a structure that expresses duality between organic and orthogonal forms. Its design is of a subtractive form rather than that of a primitive hut which is of a additive form. 'The 13th Villa' Is a project by O'Donnell that was as exhibited in 'Emerging Talents, Emerging Technologies' at the 2006 Beijing Architecture Biennial.
