Since 2008, CODA has become known for their highly experimental projects that play with everyday materials. For instance, their URCHIN installation for Cornell's CCA Biennial is made up of 500 borrowed plastic chairs and some may remember their 2013 MoMA PS1 Pavilion, Party Wall, made of skateboard offcuts. 

The founder and sole principal Caroline O'Donnell, who also teaches at Cornell, talks with us about her practice, background in bioclimatics, and material misuse—the term given to reusing ordinary objects for their built works.  

How many people are in your practice?

4, with wild fluctuations from 2 to 15, depending on the workload.

Why were you originally motivated to start your own practice?   

I was working at Eisenman Architects in 2008. I was interested in the ability of form to communicate — to say something — so I fit in well there, and I was leading large design projects. But I wondered: what if instead of architecture saying something about itself (the famous self-referentiality of Eisenman’s work) what if it could say something bigger, about its environment, about its ecology, about its energy, and so on. So I started teaching at Cornell in Ithaca and started CODA with the goal of asking those questions.

How does your background in bioclimatics inform your work?

I had two very different educations: a technical architecture education with a specialization in Bioclimatics in Manchester, England and a fairly theory-heavy education at Princeton. My book, Niche Tactics finally tied these two together. Having a background in Bioclimatics really allowed me to come at formalism from a different perspective: to think about architectural meaning not as self-obsession but potentially as something communicative of a bigger agenda.

Bioclimatics in Manchester was taught in a really wonderful way too, not looking at solutions to architectural problems, as sustainability so often is prone to do, but looking at the origins of the movement, at animal-environment relationships, ecological theory, and perceptual theory.

We try to think about how the form of the work can be not only responsive to its environment, but also make the response legible

So the work of the office really builds on both of those great opposing forces in architecture: formalism and sustainability. We try to think about how the form (and material) of the work can be not only responsive to its environment, but also make the response legible, so that we are not only thinking ecologically in our small architectural work, but provoking ecological thoughts in others who encounter the work, which in the end might be more effective.

What hurdles have you come across?

We have won several large scale competitions for large projects (Europan, especially) that never came to fruition because of various financial crises. While several winning entries for small pavilion competitions have been realized—and that’s what we’ve become known for—we do love the big stuff too. Finding clients for larger scale permanent projects is our greatest challenge.

Your work often plays with everyday materials.

We like to call it material misuse. We sometimes use leftovers, like the skateboard offcuts that we used to make benches and facades at Party Wall. Other times we use standard materials in unusual ways, like the chairs in Urchin, the pigeonspikes in Goosebumps, the grillwood in Bloodline.  The effect of these materials involves the observer in a process of deciphering: from a distance, the material seems like a vaguely interesting pattern…but upon closer inspection, its identity becomes clear. That engagement, that twist, produces a kind of a-ha moment. This is the first point, the wake-up. Then, there is the possibility that the observer is able to continue along that trajectory, thinking about how the chair or skateboard is now in this dual state of object and fabric, and how the object must now be rethought: what is it made of, how is it made, where did the material come from, what happens to the waste?

Is scaling up a goal or would you like to maintain the size of your practice?

It’s often the case that what seems like a not-so-great project actually becomes one, or vice-versa, or one seemingly uninteresting project leads to a great one

If we scale up, it would be only slightly. I believe it’s better to be selective and do a few great works than to get too big and lose control. However, it’s often the case that what seems like a not-so-great project actually becomes one, or vice-versa, or one seemingly uninteresting project leads to a great one, so it’s not so simple. Often a good way for us to work is to collaborate with other designers and offices. We have done that on many projects and joined forces with other small offices: Andreas Quednau and Sabine Muller (SMAQ), Misako Murata and James Lowder (LMNOP), Maziar Behrooz (MB Architecture), Troy Schaum (Schaum/Shieh) and we are currently working on a decomposing pavilion called Primitive Hut for the OMI Sculpture Park with Martin Miller (Antistatics). That will be going up in September (and then coming down all by itself over the next two years) so stay tuned for that.

What are the benefits of having your own practice? And staying small?

We are able to ask ourselves: what’s important to us? How do we push forward in a direction that is unique to us, to ask questions that only we are asking? It is experimentation, research, and exploration of unknown territory.