In Conversation: Chad Oppenheim

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We thought that, being in a [condo] saturated marketplace, this would give us a unique selling proposition for the project, one that would generate a lot of energy and excitement, get more people passionate about it, supporting it, investing in it.

As architects, it is our responsibility to lead the way, but it ultimately takes great clients to follow an idea through. No one wants to pollute their environment or do something bad. Everyone wants to do green, but it all boils down to cost. There are still big clients who are not ready for it; they’re saying they’ll make room for solar panels, but in the future.

Normally, the 5-10 percent cost increase that a green building would require wouldn’t be an issue. But with the prices for basic materials costing so much more—100 percent more in some cases—there’s a real sensitivity to adding any extra costs. If we hadn’t seen this spike in material prices, I think everyone would be more excited about doing green right now.

User-generated content is all the rage right now online, with sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and MySpace transforming the Web. You have a “new frontier” type of project, Cube, that is perhaps somewhat analogous: It’s user-generated design. Let me read to you what you’ve said about Cube: It “creates the possibility for ultimate volumetric flexibility ... [It] promotes its occupants to design vertically, horizontally, and diagonally. … [It’s ] true interactive architecture.” It’s an overused word, but maybe it’s fair to say Cube is quite a radical concept, allowing buyers, to some extent, to shape the final form of the building—and taking some of the control away from the architect. What was its original inspiration?

The original inspiration was my thesis project at Cornell, an idea of creating a vertical neighborhood, with people building and defining their own domains similar to how they do so in horizontal developments of single-family houses.

But that being said, this project is not an opportunity to put something learned in school into the work of my practice. Whenever we are confronted with a project, we think first of the structural systems to get efficiency and clarity. Before we design, it’s not here is the pretty picture; it’s here is the most efficient and pure and elemental way to design a project in context of the program.

So in examining this project, and the complex configurations of the site, I began having conversations with my engineer. And this building was made possible because of the amazing Yrsael Seinuk, one of the greatest living engineers.

In discussions I had with him, it was, “What if we do the structural system on the outside, a gridded, diagonal bracing, so we don’t need sheer walls to come down internally?” And it was this analysis of how to deal with the structure on the outside, how do we simplify the building, how do we make it more economical, that generated the ideas that led to this steel-structure concept: People buy cubes of space and connect them in whatever way fits their domestic requirements, with all the mechanical systems tapped from the central core.

Buyers can configure the cubes in many ways. You can buy two cubes and place them horizontally, buy three and go with two horizontal, one vertical, et cetera. The idea being you can start to define your own domain; we want people to have the flexibility to dream.

As architects, we’re always creating infrastructure, but what happens inside is up to the occupant. I love that personalization, and this project [enables] it at the massive scale of a high-rise building where the buyers have flexibility and control over the final look of the project. There is a definite appeal to me in letting this randomness affect the architecture.

In addition to designing Ten Museum, you’re one of its developers as well. From a purely design perspective, what are the pros and cons of having an equity stake in a building?

When I see a phenomenal opportunity, a location that hasn’t been tapped, and I can put together a proposal for a project that takes advantage of this, it’s like an actor creating his own vehicle—like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon writing Good Will Hunting so they could star in it.