ODA: Office of Design and Architecture

Founded in 2007 by Eran Chen, ODA seeks to reconcile the conditions of vertical urban living with quality of life and has established a reputation for mold-breaking designs. Seeking to reorder urban architectural priorities by putting people first, ODA challenges conventional perspectives of dwelling that will, over time, influence life in our cities.

Full of setbacks, cutouts, and terraces, an ODA building invariably has an exciting profile, tending to be sculptural where important to be visually exciting, up in the sky, and plainer where more important to be straightforward, at street level. Building shapes catch the eye but forms are never arbitrary or excessive. Some, like 15 Renwick in Manhattan, as observed by Goldberger, “are … well-behaved, and defer to the street more than show off their shape; others, like Bevel in Long Island City, Queens, … are more striking … but they never come off as excessive, as form for form’s sake.”

With chapters moving from Apartment to Building to Block to Neighborhood and a gatefold that reveals an exciting new project destined to enliven the New York skyline, the book’s message underlines ODA’s fundamental understanding that nothing exists in isolation, and the goal of architecture is not just the making of comfortable and visually pleasing places in which to live, but the making of community.