Waterside woman’s ‘Europan’ win

The former Thornhill College schoolgirl, from Parklands, won the biennial competition for young architects under 40 years of age with her funky, modern vision for revamping an area of dock lands in Dublin.

The basic aim of the competition is to encourage young architects to design innovative housing schemes for sites across Europe. The competition encourages architects to address social and economic changes occurring in towns and cities and offers the opportunity for cross-cultural learning and networking for the architects and site promoters involved.

The Europan competition was rolled out over 17 countries, involved 49 sites, and attracted 1,826 entries. There were 325 pre-selected projects and 95 winning teams across the whole of Europe, with 41 winners, 54 runners-up, and 54 ‘honourable mentions’.

The size and scale of the competition serves to add to the distinction that Ms O’Donnell, who now lives in Ithaca, New York State, has drawn to her innovative work. The fact that Belfast-based Architects Patrick Wheeler and Jane Larmour came second in the same strand of the competition, make it a remarkable 1-2 ‘win’ for the province’s emerging architectural talent.

Caroline’s ‘day job’ is as a lecturer in Cornell University, Ithaca, where she is the Richard Meier Assistant Professor, teaching a full range of related subjects, from design to theory.

Quietly humble about her success, Caroline said she viewed her career path as “just being one step at a time”.

A student of architecture at Manchester School of Architecture, which she followed with further study in Sydney, Australia, before packing her bags for Rotterdam because “that’s where things were happening in term of architecture if you wanted to do something less conservative”.

“If you wanted to do something more avant garde the general consensus was that Rotterdam was the place to be. It was just before the Olympics in 1997 that I went to Sydney, as I thought there would be a lot happening there, as well as for sampling the general energy of the country,” Caroline said of her travels.

It was while in Rotterdam that Caroline decided to undertake her MA, and among the offers she got was a place at Princeton University.

Describing it as “a really amazing offer”, Caroline travelled to New Jersey and spent the next year and a half doing her MA, where she studied with Peter Eiseman, a well-known and influential man in the world of architecture.

“So, I was his student and he offered me a post in his office in New York. I was also his teaching assistant in Princeton and I continued to work in his office before getting a teaching job at the Cooper Union University in New York and finally in May 2008, I got offered the job at Cornell as a visiting architect,” she said, adding that she landed the Assistant Professorship last summer.

Caroline admits to loving her work, but believes that it is her work as an architect in her own right that informs how she relates and interacts with the Cornell students, and when asked what her favourite piece of design work is that she has done herself, she ponders the question before talking about ‘Bloodline’ a project that she did in Germany, in which she designed a barbecue pavilion in Stuttgart.

“I was in an artists’ residence called Solitude, and you basically had eight months to do a project of your choice, and I completely free to do whatever I wanted, so I decided to really look into the situation of an old palace from the 1700s, and to really try and understand the castle and to make it the Barbecue Pavilion,” she said.

While a small installation was raised at the site, the entire project has yet to get the funding it needs to complete the project, meaning Caroline’s three-phase project vision is still very much one on paper, with the research and design aspects completed, but the construction phase yet to complete.

A regular visitor home, Caroline is pleased that she can now add a Europan win to her amazing career successes. She did enter it before, and in 2009 actually came second for a project relating to a zone in Leisnig in Germany.

“That was quite interesting, because the Mayor of that town wanted to build both the first and second prize projects. Normally the second place does not have the potential to move forward, but the Mayor was very enthusiastic and wanted to build mine too, but they are still looking for funding. I did that project with a partner, Troy Schaun, from the US,” she said.

In her vision for the Dublin dock lands Caroline tried to experiment with and stretch the space between the small scale of the row of houses there and the industrial edifices with the cranes along the river front, without losing the aesthetics of either. The design adopted echoes of the existing buildings, including the chimneys, and the retrospective ambience of the buildings, and through manipulation of these elements Caroline was able to produce a portfolio to rejuvenate the area with modern glass buildings offering a new, funky sub-urban lifestyle.