Caroline O'Donnell

Caroline O'Donnell is an Irish designer, writer, and professor of architecture. She is principal of the firm CODA, currently based in Ithaca, NY, USA. As CODA she won the PS1 MoMA Young Architects Program in 2013 and built "Party Wall" at PS1 in Long Island City, New York. She is the Richard Meier Professor of Architecture at Cornell University and Editor-in-Chief of the Cornell Journal of Architecture. Her first book "Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships between Architecture and Site," was published in April 2015.[1]

O'Donnell was born and raised in Athlone, Ireland and Derry, N.Ireland. She received her B.Arch from the Manchester School of Architecture in England in 2000. She worked with Nettleton Willoughby Williams in Sydney, Australia, from 1997–98 and with KCAP (Kees Christiaanse Architects and Planners) in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, from 2000-2004.

She received a Masters from Princeton School of Architecture in 2006 and worked at Eisenman Architects until 2008. O'Donnell founded CODA in 2008 and subsequently received second and first prize in Europan 10 and 11 with Urban Punc., Leisnig,(in collaboration with Troy Schaum) in Germany and Counterspace, in Dublin Ireland.

She has taught at the Cooper Union and Cornell University, where she holds the Richard Meier Professorship. She has written for Log, Thresholds,and Pidgin.

In 2012 O'Donnell won the Europan11 competition for Counterspace, designed for a site in the Dublin Docklands. In 2013, O'Donnell was awarded the Royal Hibernian Academy’s Arthur Gibney Award for Work with Outstanding Architectural Content. Also in 2013 as principal of CODA she won the MoMA PS 1 Young Architects Program for her 'Party Wall' sustainable structure. In 2012, O'Donnell won the Martin Dominguez Award for distinguished teaching at Cornell University and was named by DesignIntelligence as one of the nation’s “30 Most Admired Educators for 2013”.

"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.