Caroline O'Donnell

She has previously taught at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union, and at Harvard GSD.

O'Donnell was born and raised in Athlone, Ireland and later in Derry, N.Ireland. She received her B.Arch with a specialization in Bioclimatics from the Manchester School of Architecture in England in 2000, winning the Heywood Medal for the most outstanding final year student. She worked with Nettleton Willoughby Williams in Sydney, Australia, from 1997 to 1998 and with KCAP (Kees Christiaanse Architects and Planners) in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, from 2000 to 2004. She received Master of Architecture from Princeton School of Architecture in 2006, sponsored by the Arts Council of Ireland and the Fonds BKVB in the Netherlands, where she won the Susan K. Underwood Prize awarded to the graduating M.Arch student demonstrating exceptional ability and talent throughout their studies in Architectural Design. She subsequently worked at Eisenman Architects until 2008, having a lead design role in the Hamburg Library competition, Pompei Santuario Train Station, and others. O’Donnell moved to Ithaca to teach at Cornell University in 2008 and it is there that she founded CODA, an architectural practice that promotes sustainability through a close relationship between architecture and environment. In 2010, she received second prize in Europan 10 competition with Urban Punc., a proposal for urban regeneration for the city of Leisnig, Germany (with Troy Schaum) and in 2012, she won first prize in the Europan 11 competition, with the project Counterspace, designed for a site in the Dublin Docklands. In 2013, CODA won the MoMA PS 1 Young Architects Program with the project 'Party Wall which used the by-product from skateboard manufacturing and leftover steel as well as the Royal Hibernian Academy’s Arthur Gibney Award for Work with Outstanding Architectural Content. In 2016, CODA’s project ‘Urchin,’ a pavilion made entirely from plastic chairs, was selected to be built for the Cornell Council of the Arts Biennial. Since 2014, O’Donnell has had a collaboration with Martin Miller, under the banner of OMG. They have collaborated on several projects, including Art Dock, a submission for the Helsinki Guggenheim Museum competition, Zimmer, a walking house and Rickshaw, for which they were finalists in the Street Architecture: Ideas City Pavilion Competition, Storefront for Art and Architecture/New Museum, New York. In 2017, OMG opened its first built work: a decomposing pavilion Primitive Hut at Art Omi, Ghent. In 2018, OMG opened a second pavilion, named Evitim: a pavilion made from the waste of Primitive Hut. In addition, O’Donnell heads the Ecological Action Lab (EAL) at Cornell, whose research projects experiment with nose-to-tail practices, novel materials, and the reimagining of the function of objects. Current projects include explorations into architecture and waste with potato starch, manure, sheet metal, and wood. Alongside OMG and EAL collaborations, O’Donnell continues to lead CODA with projects such as an inclusive addition to the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and housing at various scales in Ithaca, NY. In 2017, O'Donnell was named one of the world's top 30 female architects by Azure Magazine.

Together with Marc McQuade and Brian Tabolt, O’Donnell co-founded the journal Pidgin at Princeton in 2005. From 2008 to 2017 she was the editor-in-chief of the Cornell Journal of Architecture, publishing issue 8: RE, issue 9: Mathematics: from the Ideal to the Uncertain, and issue 10: Spirits. O’Donnell has contributed essays to several journals including Log, Thresholds, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, Pidgin, and others.