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CAROLINE O'DONNELL: So every year, PS1 MOMA does this
competition in the courtyard of PS1.
So I've known about the competition for years, since I
came to the States.
And I've visited several of the pavilions.
And I've always found them really exciting.
Really those kind of projects where the designers are
clearly stretching their legs and being allowed to have
design freedom versus being problem solvers.
The brief is quite simple.
We are supposed to provide shade and water, a space for
the warm up series party every Saturday.
This year they changed it a little bit and incorporated
EXPO 1, maybe a lecture would happen, maybe an art studio
would happen, a film screening.
What's really important is context.
So the way that we approach a project is to really look at
what's there as a set of things to respond to in order
to generate the project.
And so we started looking at context in
various different ways.
So what does it look like?
What is the climatic context?
How does the sun move around the site?
The historical context, it's a very short history of 13
previous projects.
We realized that there are a lot of canopy projects.
And we wanted to figure out, how can we solve the same
problems but in a different way.
So we're in the architecture department, Sibley Hall, at
Cornell University.
This is where we've been working since we won the
competition.
I do three things.
I teach at Cornell.
I design.
And I write.
The issues that I'm writing about help me to figure out
what am I doing in the design project.
And what I'm writing about comes from teaching seminars
at Cornell.
So all of those three things, even though it's a lot, they
nudge each other forward.
I went to the University of Manchester to study
architecture.
I specialized in bioclimatics, which is, on one hand, you
could think of it as sustainability, but it was a
lot more than that.
It was about looking at the animal and environment
relationship.
And looking at nature to see how does nature behave and how
can we learn from that in architecture.
I took a year out in Sydney.
Came back to Manchester to finish my BArch.
And then moved to Holland.
I worked on a range of projects from urban scale to
architectural scale.
And during that four year period, I did eight
competitions.
And after that, I was ready to go to grad school.
So I came to Princeton.
Peter Eisenman is the person who taught me about meaning in
architecture.
That architecture can be legible.
It can say something.
So I stayed in New York for about two and a half years.
I also taught at Cooper Union at the same time.
And then finally I came to Ithaca.
I started CODA in 2008 as a way to figure out what kind of
design practice do I want to have versus how do I fit into
other offices.
And those other offices have been hugely influential on me.
But I think it was time then to figure out how am I going
to approach design.
We've done, I think, nine projects since the
beginning of CODA.
CODA is really just me, but I've collaborated with many
people over the years in various competitions.
And this project in particular has become highly
collaborative.
Many people are involved.
The core team of designers.
The students who volunteer on the weekends and who will
volunteer on site.
And then many, many layers of consultants and advisers who
are also involved.
SUZANNE LETTIEN: So my name's Suzanne.
I am the project leader for the PS1 project.
For the most part, I've been dealing with all of the
consultants and organizing everyone.
And I'm dealing with structure and the water bladders, which
are the 4,000 gallons of water that are ballasting the
structure down.
Because it's a temporary structure, extensive
foundations don't make sense.
So the water bags basically hold the structure down.
MICHAEL JEFFERSON: I'm Michael Jefferson.
I'm a member of CODA.
For my part of the project, I have responsibility over the
ground material as well as the water systems.
There's a series of pools.
There's a large misting station.
And there's also a spout.
CAROLINE O'DONNELL: When we were designing the project, we
were all obsessed with walls.
And if you think about the wall in relation to water,
which was part of the brief, a wall
with water as an aqueduct.
So it's a big loop with an aqueduct at the top, a
fountain, and then a series of pools at the bottom.
STEVEN CLIPP: I'm Steven Clipp.
Really, from the beginning, I was very particularly involved
with the facade work.
So when we were doing the competition, it was a number
of different facade iterations that we did over the course of
a few weeks.
CAROLINE O'DONNELL: We had the wall early on, but the wall
has problems.
The brief says to not take up any space because there will
be a lot of people dancing.
We immediately knew that we needed to lift the wall up and
basically let it only touchdown on a few feet, a
little bit like an animal.
If you look back through the sketch book, there are a lot
of Trojan horse proposals, early wall proposals, that do
look like letters.
The way that we've just cut away at the feet and at the
top starts to look like a word already.
It was very clear how we should work.
It wasn't clear what we would end up with.
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