ODA-Architecture

By Ingrid Spencer

For Eran Chen, founder of the three-year-old Office for Design & Architecture (ODA), managing a 30-person studio at Perkins Eastman in New York City, where he worked for eight years, was almost like running his own company. Only it wasn’t. “They are a big company,” says Chen, “and although I had a lot of autonomy, I still knew I would someday have my own firm. I wanted to push  the envelope and do more experimental work.”

In 2007, with an exciting project — renovating New York City’s famed Toy Building on Madison Square Park — in hand, Chen began ODA with two colleagues from Perkins Eastman, P. Christian Bailey, AIA, and Ryoko Okada. Unfortunately, Lehman Brothers was financing the project, and we all know what happened to them. To this day, the building is empty and in bankruptcy. “We finished full construction documents,” says Chen, “and we’re still hoping the project will come back to life.” The blow was a hard one for the fledgling design firm. “We had some rough times,” says Chen. “We were on a track of doing seven very big projects shortly after we began, and four of them stopped.”

Thankfully, the three New York City projects that remained were more than prominent enough to keep the partners working and building a rather stellar portfolio. A renovation of 15 Union Square West, an 1870s building that originally housed the Tiffany & Co. headquarters, was finished last year. Also recently completed is the C.C. Residence, a commission won from a competition launched by the unnamed, forword-thinking owner of the top two floors of the 90-story Trump World Tower in New York City. That project boasts 20,000 square feet of living space, including a sculpture garden and a professional-grade recording studio. Then there’s The James New York hotel in SoHo, a 76,000-square-foot hotel with 110 rooms/suites surrounded by 10,000 square feet of stepped gardens. Finally, the Long Island City Bagel Shop, an adaptive reuse project in Queens converting a gas-station garage into a bakery, will be completed later this year.

The three partners run their firm collaboratively, although Chen says he directs much of the design, while Bailey handles a lot of the project management, and Okada’s specialty is interior design. Currently a 10-person team, Chen says that is down from the 18 people that made up ODA before the recession hit. Actively seeking more public cultural projects, the firm is constantly competing in international competitions. They have also designed furniture, including a bassinet and easel with children’s furniture company Argington; ODA Room, a modular bedroom system; the Mosaic Folding Chair, a lounge chair that, when folded, converts to an elegant room divider; and the Sunk Sofa, which is part of Italian furniture company Moroso’s product line. Chen says the process of designing both buildings and smaller-scale projects is “very fluid. I can concentrate on designing a private house in the morning and a chair in the afternoon.” But about the firm’s product design, he says, “The furniture is not for the income, it’s for the soul.”

Also adding to the soul of ODA is the variety of sensibilities that each member brings to the table. Chen grew up in Israel, Okada in Japan, and most of the team members have international backgrounds. Also important to the firm’s collective design philosophy is Chen’s belief that every site has its own DNA to consider. “There’s a history that exists way before the architect comes along,” he says. “There’s a chain of information the we must first identify, then make it multiply. It’s holistic.” 

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