James Joyce or Britney Spears: Caroline O'Donnell on Horizons, Bioclimatics, and Unadmiring

By Julia Gamolina

Caroline O’Donnell is a licensed architect, writer, and educator. Her work focuses on architecture that is responsive to its environment, often transforming between multiple states, whether by mechanical, human or natural means. She is perhaps best known for winning the MoMA PS1 Young Architects' Program with Party Wall which was built at PS1 in 2013; Urchin chair pavilion, winner of the Cornell Arts Biennial competition in 2016; and for two prize-winning Europan housing schemes. Caroline is also the Edgar A. Tafel associate professor and director of the M.Arch at program Cornell University, where she teaches studios and seminars on themes of environmentally responsive architecture and material reuse. She previously taught at Harvard GSD and the Cooper Union.

O'Donnell's first book Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships Between Architecture and Site was published in 2015. She was the editor-in-chief of the Cornell Journal of Architecture from 2009 - 2017 and founding editor of Pidgin Magazine in 2005. Caroline has a B.Arch from Manchester University, England (2000) with a specialization in Bioclimatics and an M.Arch from Princeton University (2004). She has practiced at KCAP, (Kees Christiaanse Architects and Planners) in Rotterdam; Nettleton Willoughby Williams in Sydney, Australia; and Eisenman Architects in New York. In her interview, Caroline talks about her identity as a juggler and the financial setbacks many architects face, advising young architects not to plan too much so as not to limit their potential.

JG: What was the first seed of your interest in architecture?

COD: It’s hard to say, but I like to believe it’s something to do with the street I grew up on, Whitebeam Avenue, in Athlone, Ireland. Along that street, a man was building the same house over and over, slowly, and making small adjustments as he progressed.

There were always a few on the go, two or three at foundation stage, and then there were slabs and half walls—it was the best playground. I learned really early and through physical experience what a plan is, what typology is, what variations are. Sadly, I don’t think it’s legal for children to play on building sites anymore…probably never was.

Evitim by OMG, a collaboration between Martin Miller and Caroline O’Donnell.

You survived! Where did you then study architecture?

I went to high school in Derry, Northern Ireland and from there I went to architecture school in Manchester, England. I wanted to be a drummer in a grunge band, and Manchester had a huge music scene, but it also happened to be a really great place to study architecture. I got side-tracked by that and never became a rock star.

While in Manchester, I took a year off in Australia. The Olympic Games were to be hosted there in 2000 and I thought that maybe I could get to design the Olympic stadium. I was not ambitious at all [laughs]. Obviously I did not design it, but I came back after that year, to Manchester, with real, renewed passion.

What did you first do out of school?

After graduating, I went to the Netherlands and worked there. At that time, if you wanted to do interesting work, that’s where you went. I worked at KCAP, Rotterdam—the office was more urban design than architecture, so that was a whole new education for me.

However, I came out of that knowing even more so that I wanted to be an architect. Urban design in Holland is the best, because people are much more open-minded about design, versus policy, at that scale. It was fun and I could do things that were more creative than just solving problems, but at the end of the day, I wanted to do things that were more expressive or communicative than seemed to be possible, or responsible, as an urban designer.

“...the architects who focused on sustainability and those who focused on architectural theory weren’t the same people, and they didn’t really like each other.”

How did you do that?

I did a lot of competitions after hours and went to graduate school - to Princeton. In Manchester, I had specialized in bioclimatics. The program was really amazing because it looked at the roots of other environmental thinkers who weren’t architects - perceptual psychologists, philosophers, and so on. Besides my theoretical understanding of sustainability, I didn’t have much of a theory background in the traditional architectural sense.

I certainly made up for that at Princeton. The interesting thing for me was that the architects who focused on sustainability and those who focused on architectural theory weren’t the same people, and they didn’t really like each other. For a while, at Princeton, I put my “embarrassing” background aside and learned a formalist approach from Peter Eisenman and the push back against that from others like Sarah Whiting.

Did you work for Peter Eisenman right out of Princeton?

Yes. I thought I would move to Berlin and live happily ever after there, and I had told Peter after the first summer in his office that I would never be back, but then he offered me a job I couldn’t refuse: Pompei Train Station. It wasn’t a competition, it was a real building, I had my own team, and I TA-ed for him at Princeton.

What I learned from Peter, which is obvious, is that architecture can communicate—one of the main things I also learned at Princeton. I thought, if architecture can communicate, what do I want it to say?

I worked in his office for two or three years and later I taught at the Cooper Union too. I then wanted to start my own practice, which didn’t seem financially possible in New York City. At just the right moment, I got a call from Cornell. I thought I would be there for one year, but I’m still there [laughs].

K House in collaboration with Dillon Pranger.

Tell me about both Cornell and life outside of it, in Ithaca.

I’ve so far been here eleven years. I had quite a miserable first year, actually. I didn’t have any friends up there—being a professor was pretty lonely. The good thing was that I put a lot of work into preparing the first classes that I taught, especially the theory classes. Through this, I had generated a few little texts - without knowing I had essentially produced three chapters of a book and I just had to fill in the blanks. A book was magically doable, since I had written a third of it without knowing that I was taking on such a massive task. That’s how my book Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships between Architecture and Sire got started.

Besides teaching and writing, I started my practice CODA, mainly doing competitions, mostly large scale projects in Europe. We got prizes in a couple of Europan competitions, one in collaboration with Troy Schaum, which gave us some momentum and the practice took off from there.

The practice certainly took off with Party Wall, your winning entry for MoMA PS1. Tell me about that.

PS1 came at a good moment, because, after a few years of working on competitions in Ithaca, and teaching and writing, which helped me develop my position, I knew what the rules were by which I wanted to practice - context as the generator of a design, design that says something back about context, questions of materiality and use, questions about dynamism and change and interaction, questions about communication, audience and perception. The project aims to provoke thinking at many different levels of engagement from the partier to the close-reading architect. It was really a test of ideas that we are continuing to play out in every project we have in the practice today.

“Peter used to ask, “Do you want to be James Joyce or Britney Spears?” Do you want to speak to an elite architectural close-reader or a lay person, with your ‘lyrics’?””

Speaking of levels of engagement, talk to me more about learning to communicate through architecture.

Peter and I talked a lot about audience - who are we communicating with? Peter used to ask, “Do you want to be James Joyce or Britney Spears?” He was saying, do you want to speak to an elite architectural close-reader or a lay person, with your ‘lyrics’? I was interested in the potential audience being both of those things at the same time, and that is still central to my work today.

It wasn’t until later when I went to Cornell to teach was that I started thinking that maybe the thing that it says is not so much about itself, but instead, about a bigger context. I thought about my background in bioclimatics and thought, “What if I put these two incongruous things together?” I started doing analyses, but rather than thinking about the architectural object, I began to include the greater context…things that were implied but often not represented, things like the weather, or other contextual elements.

I think Party Wall, the PS1 project, is a good example of that. On one hand it’s a puzzle to figure out; if you zoom out and think about the relationship of sun, ground, and object, you can read the word ‘WALL’ on the ground. Anyone can do that. But it also brings up other discussions of architecture as sign, from Venturi and Scott-Brown’s billboard to Eisenman’s index, as well as the politics of walls as borders, or Magritte’s Ceci n'est pas une pipe…, or the architecture of waste and global production and consumption.

Party Wall, photography by Zachary Tyler Newton.

Where are you in your career today?

I’m a juggler. I should have that on my business card - Caroline O’Donnell, Juggler. It’s really something to balance teaching, administrating Cornell’s M.Arch program, running a practice, writing, and I haven’t even spoken about the fifth thing I’m currently managing [laughs, gestures towards growing belly]. I haven’t found a good solution for how to do that, except to just keep working. I’m going to have to see how this whole new world with Lúnasa is going to be. It could be that I can totally manage to do all these things, and it could be that I can’t. We’ll figure it out [laughs].

Tell me about this fifth challenge.

You know, sometimes, people do ask me what it’s like to be a woman in this profession. I genuinely never noticed any difference until recently.

“...the financial limitations were much more palpable than any gender issues. We need to change that.”

Until recently because of the pregnancy?

In a way, but also since the issue became a lot more discussed in recent months. I never experienced any discrimination, at least not that I perceived, so I hadn’t given it much thought. But yes, thinking about how a baby would fit into this life certainly made me think about the question anew. There’s no fat to be cut from my current schedule so I am yet to figure out how I can continue to be a fierce work horse and keep another human being alive at the same time.

There are plenty of amazing role models out there, so I know it’s possible. My hope is that it will be as Lydia Kallipoliti described it in her book The Architecture of Closed Worlds, or What is the Power of Shit. She wrote, in her acknowledgements, to her daughter: “I feared motherhood would hinder my ability to focus and work productively; instead you inspired me so much more with your energy, your relentless positivity, and your unwavering curiosity to discover the world. Life with you is full of wonder.”

My mom has said something similar to me too – she said because she was trying to make my life so great, hers became really great too. Before Lúnasa, what have been the biggest challenges?

A lot of my challenges are actually not really architectural. Most have been financial. I’m lucky that I got the support—I mean, funding—that I got. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be talking to you today. I had a free education in the U.K. and only had little loans from living expenses. In Princeton, I had a scholarship from the school, as well as two major grants, one from Arts Council of Ireland and one from the Fonds BKVB in the Netherlands. I couldn’t have done any of this without that support. We don’t talk about it enough. That it’s incredibly difficult to pay for an architectural education. To repay an architectural education.

Primitive Hut by OMG, a collaboration between Martin Miller and Caroline O’Donnell.

It’s incredibly difficult. That’s why people use the word ‘crippling’ - crippling debt.

I remember a Pritzker Prize winners’ exhibition years ago, and there was backlash because it was just pictures of men, and sure, that’s absolutely an issue, but in many ways that’s the easy problem because it’s clear to see. What we don’t see is how much money they had in their bank accounts in order to become these architects. For me the financial limitations were much more palpable than any gender issues. We need to change that.

That’s huge! If the only people starting forward-thinking, creative practices are ones who come from financial backing, then we are limiting the potential of so many others, and of our field. We need the equivalent of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund in architecture.

With this in mind, who are you admiring right now?

I don’t buy into the idea of role models much. I’ve learned a lot from people I don’t admire. Probably all of the offices I worked in, either in Northern Ireland, or the Netherlands, or Australia, or here — I’ve seen a lot of things done in a way I didn’t want to do things. That has been as important to me as the positive role models.

Maybe this is a very Irish way of looking at the world, but I spent so much time thinking “this is not how I would run a practice” that I also had to ask: “if not that, then what would I do?” It’s been useful to be in situations where I’m unadmiring. It’s helped me figure out a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t have figured out if I had been too happy.

What has been the general approach to your career?

My career is a series of great accidents. I didn’t plan any of this, I just worked hard and took every opportunity that came along. This is something I think about often because I talk to students about what they’re going to do next. When I was graduating from Manchester, I thought I was going to work in a good office in Dublin or London, and someday move back home to Derry and start an urban and architectural design practice. Even my highest ambition was so much less than what I have done. If I had stuck to my ambition, I would have had a comparatively boring career.

I didn’t plan to stay in this country, I didn’t plan to teach, I didn’t plan to have this kind of office that combines practice and theory in a way that is so much more interesting than the way I could have imagined it. It’s fine to have a plan, but you have to also know that your horizons at the moment that you make the plan are potentially lower than they will be later.

“Too much planning stifles your potential.”

When I first graduated from school I wrote out all these five-year goals, and got very frustrated and anxious because things weren’t happening quickly enough, or I didn’t know how to make them happen.

And you probably didn’t plan Madame Architect, for example.

Didn’t plan Madame Architect at all - it’s been one of the most organic evolutions ever - but I did look back at those five-year goals recently, because I’m six years out of school, and I started crying because everything kind of happened, but also in ways that are so much better than I imagined.

Too much planning stifles your potential. It’s just finding and taking opportunities, and seeing chances to do something interesting. You don’t know what’s going to come of it. Just do everything, work hard, and try to give yourself enough time to make sense of it all sometimes.

Finally, what advice do you have for those just starting their careers?

Being yourself sounds cheesy but it’s actually not that easy in this world to be yourself. I remember my first day of architecture school, in Manchester. I was walking to school and I didn’t know anybody. I was thinking that this is the first day of the rest of my life. I could be anyone I wanted to be. And I thought, “How about I just try being myself?” That was a very important decision. That allowed my sense of humor and mischievousness to be part of my work and my thinking.

So I’d advise people to be themselves, rather than trying to fit in to a preconceived notion of what they think they should be. As a design student, when you get a brief, the first thing you should do is look the brief over and not say, “What does my professor - or eventually, client - want me to do?” Think about what unique perspective you are going to bring to that brief. You listen to the advisors, of course, but then you are passionate about what you do. You can’t love it if you’re doing someone else’s work or trying to be somebody else.

*Lúnasa Kai Miller-O’Donnell was born on August 23, 2019. Caroline’s post interview report states that she has found someone to admire.

**additional editing by Caitlin Dashiell