Few New York architecture firms have so persistently reworked the massing of the urban midrise as ODA. Over the past two decades, the firm has gained a reputation for turning building profiles into stepped compositions of solids and voids, as seen in residential buildings like 15 Union Square West and 101 West 14th Street. Today, ODA reaches new heights. With a slew of upcoming towers, it now brings its signature to the vertical realm.
In New York, the 28-story Malabar Residences NYC, with cantilevered terraces forming Tetris-like pockets of air, nears completion at 126 East 57th Street, just steps from Billionaires’ Row. A mile west, at 740 Eighth Avenue, a new supertall known as The Torch restarted construction earlier this year. In renderings, the 1,067-foot tower—rumored to include a thrill ride within—features an open-air, spiraling ribbon that traces its perimeter to the top. At 303 East 44th Street, another tower that broke ground this year will feature several open terraces between offset volumes hundreds of feet above the ground.
Abroad, a new tower in the Netherlands—POST Rotterdam—also nears completion. Its layered facade contains occupiable outdoor space between an outer frame and a randomized collection of lofted arches. Online, renderings of a proposed tower in Seoul depict a gaping, plant-filled void in the sky, while additional ODA projects of various scales and typologies appear with geotags in Buenos Aires, Dubai, Moscow, and elsewhere.
In a conversation with ODA founder Eran Chen, Chen spoke about ODA’s approach to beautifying cities by extending its understanding of urban life vertically. Part of that conversation is reproduced below.
Steven Sculco (SS): How have your recent commissions typically come about?
Eran Chen (EC): Today, most of our commissions come from clients just reaching out to us. They either know buildings we’ve done or are curious because they’ve read something about our narrative for future cities. If you know our work, we don’t necessarily sell style. What we sell is a narrative—storytelling, the importance of buildings in their ability to contribute to the city. So, when people come to us, they’re not necessarily saying, “Oh, I want your white building or black building, or brown building or triangular building.” Instead, they say something like, “I was impressed with how you came up with this narrative, which is totally surprising on this particular site. What do you think of my site?”
I believe that’s why we got the call from the team at 57th Street. They realized they had an important corner in Midtown East, but they were unsure about what had to be done there. They wanted to know about which type of project should come to the market, and how it could be different from other recently built towers. That was a great call, mostly because they didn’t come with an assignment. They came with questions, and I like to start commissions that way.
SS: Does your approach change when designing tall buildings compared with other typologies?
EC: Throughout my career, I’ve been obsessed with two elements that, when combined, I truly believe can shape the future of cities: density and porosity. Density is self-explanatory. Of course, density is sometimes discussed negatively, but it also has huge advantages, even beyond its potential in consolidating our imprint on the globe. Density offers incredible opportunities for interaction, if it’s done right.
Porosity, in the context of urban life, is the space between things: the gaps, voids, plazas, alleyways, recesses, terraces. I’m obsessed with this idea because I believe that one of the most beautiful elements of architecture—which was lost as cities modernized—is the life between indoors and outdoors. A beautiful apartment terrace can be one of the best meeting points for a family, and where people can connect with nature in a modest way. Courtyards can bring building dwellers together, while an alleyway can create opportunities for more intimate types of gathering or commerce. So there’s a sliding scale, if you will, of porosity that can be explored in cities.
SS: Can you speak about the design for POST Rotterdam with this idea of a sliding scale of porosity in mind?
EC: POST Rotterdam was a unique opportunity that touched on many of ODA’s principles and narratives because, essentially, it started with an old iconic building. You could say the project is a national monument, the old post office building of Rotterdam. As it was, the post office was no longer needed for its original purpose. It was a big fortress, and it only had one door that allowed people to come in and out, so it lacked the porosity that Rotterdam is desiring and wishing for.
Our solution was in the balance between density and porosity. We looked to cut through the historical building and connect the existing atrium—an already amazing space—to a newly created atrium, and to the neighborhood outside. So, the building became a public avenue, a very unique indoor street experience. We also proposed to add the tower on top. The tower brings another type of density to the combination of old and new. It was an opportunity for us to create a level of porosity—with individual outdoor spaces and balconies—that didn’t exist at that level in the city.
SS: What challenges do you face when advocating for a porous facade?
EC: We face obstacles because city regulations haven’t yet adapted to the idea of humanizing towers. The understanding is that balconies are unusable at high elevations, which is true for typical balconies. Our strategy of having balconies and terraces recessed within the building envelope actually shields those spaces from high winds. Another challenge is that recessed outdoor spaces are counted as floor area. If the code doesn’t recognize those spaces as familiar, we have to explain that they are not really typical terraces or balconies; they are a different kind of condition.
Of course, budget is a question, too. A porous facade has more area and can be more complex. We’ve been able to overcome these challenges because cities support the idea and developers realize its value. Since the quality achieved is totally different from most other buildings, developers can get more return on investment. And, I think people acknowledge that we don’t have to continue to accept the modernistic idea of extruded towers as the only game in town.
SS: This reminds me of the early tower pioneer Raymond Hood, who believed smaller footprints could actually offer more value because of what they gave back in light and air.
EC: Exactly, and it’s important to acknowledge that the perception of value is driven by the market. Remember, people vote with their feet. They either buy or don’t buy; they either rent or don’t rent; they either occupy the typical office building or they don’t. Across all our projects, value always relates to the building envelope—light and air, orientation, and outdoor space. Another factor of value is storytelling. How do you explain to people who are not architects or engineers? How do you communicate these ideas? I think that’s why we’re here—to open everyone’s eyes to the opportunities ahead, especially as we consider how we’ll live 20, 30, even 50 years from now, while density continues to draw people to cities and to a more vertical way of living.
SS: Can you describe the process of arriving at the terraced facade of Malabar Residences NYC?
EC: The building essentially combines a rectangular, straight-up volume with a wider podium through a series of setbacks that create a pixelated condition. The building is made of poured-in-place concrete, and the facade is structural, which allowed us to avoid having many columns inside. The entire facade, from the bottom up, is a sequence of stepped terraces, like a vertical village. And to achieve our idea about opening up the tower, we worked closely with the logic of New York City zoning. It’s a totally different expression of porosity than the one at POST Rotterdam, but it builds on the same basic premise.
SS: How does the experience of building in New York differ from working abroad?
EC: For construction, New York is the most dynamic city that I know. It’s the most liberal, and it’s the quickest for approval. In my experience working in 20 different countries, I can see this in perspective. For example, construction on the Malabar Residences took only about two years to complete, and it took nearly seven for POST Rotterdam. And while Malabar was approved in just seven months, it took over two years to get approvals for POST Rotterdam and a similar amount of time for our projects in other countries.
New York, in my view, is also the most interesting city in the world. From an urban standpoint, it embraces change faster than anywhere else, which means that cultural shifts happen here first while the rest of the world watches. In part, I think our firm’s international success is because we have done things in New York for over 15 years. The world has been watching.
SS: What types of architecture had the most influence on you early in your career?
EC: I was very influenced by courtyard buildings, which I visited during my days traveling as a young architect. Earlier, as a teenager, I remember villages in India where the courtyard was this magical center of culture and interconnectivity—a piece of heaven spread by architecture. I also remember my travels to places like Paris or Barcelona. In the Ciutat Vella district in Barcelona, for example, I was much more impacted by the spaces between the buildings than the buildings themselves.
Since then, this has become the most important aspect of ODA’s work. Of course, in the end, we design buildings and people look at them, but, in essence, we design the spaces between objects that frame human experience. This is where we start, and I believe it’s what leads us toward humanizing future cities. It will take very different types of buildings.
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