Hey Bk with Ofer Cohen
Ofer Cohen:
Here's a guy that does not live in Brooklyn but yet reinvented what living in Brooklyn means and built so many apartments.
Eran Chen:
Right.
Ofer Cohen:
Tell me about that
Eran Chen:
Actually, I should feel bad that I don't live in Brooklyn right no.w
Ofer Cohen:
No, no, I'm not trying to make you feel..
Eran Chen:
I know, I know.
Ofer Cohen:
I'm Ofer Cohen on this episode of Hey Bk, I talked to Eran Chen, an Israeli born architect and founder of ODA Architecture. Based in Manhattan, Eran is currently working on developments around the city and abroad, but it's in Brooklyn where his career really took off from several projects on the fourth avenue corridor through the innovative urban design of the old wrangled brewery site and all the way to Eliot Spitzer project on the Williamsburg waterfront.
Eran Chen:
You know, it's been quite fascinating because Brooklyn in so many ways is different than Manhattan and I know that people compare all the time in a way, uh, even try to kind of copy the successes from Manhattan into Brooklyn. But that's something that we shouldn't do. Because Brooklyn has this kind of character of its of it's own and it has so many more opportunities that Manhattan doesn't have anymore, so the urban texture is already kind of done.
Ofer Cohen:
Right.
Eran Chen:
And if you take exceptions, the Hudson Yard is different or the Highline that really was surprising in their scale and the way that they changed the city. Otherwise, we're just building buildings within an existing context. Where in Brooklyn, there's areas of really new invention and great developments and you can, you have the ability to really try to adopt architecture to people's life and to what people want to and how people want to live today
Ofer Cohen:
Develop more of a neighborhood than working within a confined lot.
Eran Chen:
Right. I mean, one of the things that always bothered me living in New York City is the lack of intimacy and neighborhood-like feeling. It used to be in many neighborhoods. I think that where I am on the Upper West Side, there's still a sense of it and places like Tribeca and other places, but as you know, density grows, you lose that sense of a community ownership and, how do you create it when you have a building in a street and the relationship is either you're inside the building or outside of the street. It's very tough. You have to make sure that either the streets themselves become a place of community, like we grew up, and that the buildings, the way that they're built, create a sense of belonging in an area that kind of belongs to everyone and it's not just having sort of a series of amenities, if you will, but having a territory outside of the building and inside of the building that is communal and that's a tough challenge. But I think it's exciting.
Ofer Cohen:
Eran moved to New York in 1999. He studied architecture at the elite art school Bezalel in Jerusalem where he was exposed to new ideas and culture for the first time.
Eran Chen:
I grew up in a small town in Israel in Ber Sheva, you know, when you grow in smaller towns, regardless of your talent or capabilities, your dreams are smaller than people that live in bigger towns. It's funny, partially because you don't know. You don't know what are the possibilities that are out there. My dreams were modest. Even when I came to New York, I just dreamed of landing a job in a big office and being able to go down and have lunch and eat a hot dog at the park. That was really the extent of my dream. I didn't think that it's going to grow beyond that, to be honest. You know, it was hard to land a job I would say and I'm ashamed to say is ignorance as an Israeli coming into town, I was not prepared. I didn't write my resume the right way. I sent my work experience from Israel with a resume that people didn't know how to read.
New Speaker:
This is such a typical, very typical Israeli typically
New Speaker:
Typical Israelis
Ofer Cohen:
Sounds very familiar.
Eran Chen:
And I remember. It's funny, I remember that after being denied from so many offices, I was so depressed and I went to one of my friends who was an investment banker who's been at the city for quite some time and I said, look, you gotta help me here. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I thought of myself as a decent architect. Nobody wants to take me. And he said, okay, let's see what you're sending out. And he looks at my resume and he says, no, no, no this is America, my friend. You can't have a typo in a resume. So that was my first kind of lesson. So he tied up my resume and, I applied for a few more jobs and it's the funniest story because I was so desperate. At some point somebody called me back from New Jersey and, he said, okay, can you come for an interview? I said, sure, fine. But I didn't realize at that time how big New Jersey is. And I just said, I'm going to take a cab because I took, I took a cab from the Upper West Side to a place that he's an hour and a half into Jersey. I can't even remember the name of the town. Got me broke. I couldn't even pay the taxi bill. Anyways, I get off the couch when I go into the small office, maybe 10 people. And the guy looks at my work and says, wow, I mean I think you're really good. Uh, how much money do you want to make? And I said, I don't know, maybe, maybe $50,000 a year. And he looked at me and he says, well, we're not paying that kind money. But he said I have a very good friend that I went to school with. His name is Brad Perkins. He has a very, very big company in New York City. Let me call him.
Ofer Cohen:
That's how Eran landed his big break at Perkins Eastman. But by 2007 he felt antsy.
Eran Chen:
We had our second child and I lived in a rental, a one bedroom apartment walk up on the upper west side. You know, having to carry the stroller up and down every day, et cetera. And we, we thought that was fine. Everything was fantastic. And I remember this weekend I sat with my wife and I said, look, I'm contemplating this idea of opening my own office. What do you think? And she's like, that's fantastic if you want, go for it. But my wife is a scientist. You worked at Mount Sinai making $40,000 a year. We had two kids and we said, how the hell we're going to do that? There's no way that I can take that risk. And we very quickly decided that it's not going to happen. And then a week after I'm reading the New York Times and New York Times magazine had a cover story about David Adjaye, he's quite famous now, but the story kind of tells, how he opened his firm in London and there's something about this story that totally kind of triggered my hidden desire. And I told my wife that's it. I'm doing it. And that was it.
Ofer Cohen:
Eran founded ODA just before the economy collapsed. Developer, Yitzhak Tesler gave the firm a chance converting the toy building on Madison Square Park.
Eran Chen:
He said, well, would you do it for half the fee and I said, of course.
Ofer Cohen:
Earmuffs, all the developers, earmuffs.
Eran Chen:
It's all about money. Right? And he said, so when can you start? And I said, Yitzhak, I don't even have a name for the company and frankly I don't have money, yet set aside. I know that I'm going to buy a few computers and stuff. And he said, well look, we need to start in two weeks. And I said, how are we going to do it? And I don't know if you know Yitzhak, he used to smoke a cigar in his office. It was like he's a big guy and I'm sitting there and he says, look, we got to do it. How much money do you need? And I said I think, you know, maybe $150,000 to start. So like in the movies he kind of opened the drawer, he took out a checkbook like this big one and he said $150,000. Who do I write the check to because the company didn't exist in? I said just write Eran!
Ofer Cohen:
That's a good story.
Eran Chen:
I'm grateful for this for forever and I love Yitzhak for that. Then he really trusted me and in two weeks we, we bought the equipment. We started working, you know, at the office and that was our biggest project.
Ofer Cohen:
What was your experience of being a small new office in the middle of a very big recession?
Eran Chen:
It was terrible. It was really bad. I mean, honestly, when I look back, I tap myself on the shoulder that I sustained it because it was so bad. So we lost the one big project that we had. We had to come up with ideas. So we thought of everything from giving interior design courses for housewives to, open a Bagel shop at the street. I mean, it was so desperate. We had no source of income whatsoever. We had commitment on a lease, that we couldn't pay and I had to pay salaries to people. And thank God I've made some money in whatever year and a half before and I spent it all by paying back my employees, but then a miracle happened and a friend of a friend connected us, to this, guy who was an executive in Blackstone and a billionaire who just bought his penthouse in Trump tower and he thought it's the perfect time to do a renovation of a penthouse because the market was crashed and he conducted, he knew everybody's desperate. So he conducted a competition between international architects around the world, including Richard Meyer to design his penthouse. And, you know, I did my research. He's also an American success story. Originally from Vietnam. He was a refugee of war and my entire design philosophy on this apartment was based on that and he totally fell off. He was just love at first sight, right? And, and we got the project now that was a lifesaver because just in broad terms, we knew he knew that he's going to spend about 20 to $30,000,000 on this apartment. So I spent the years of the recession, a flying around the world and a private jet looking for marble, and artwork. And the stories are so insane, excessive that it was just mine bottling. We ended up spending, you know, two and a half million dollars on a staircase. So it was so extreme from where I was that only in America that could happen, you know, we flew his private jet to yachts around the world and spent, you know, weeks in the Bahamas. It was just..
Ofer Cohen:
That's a really good recession story. So as I'm listening to you, what strikes me is like, you know, architects usually have a big plan and a path and a vision. And it sounds to me, and I don't, I don't know how much of it is real, is that, you know, you're very innocently kind of fall into things and you had a few instances, you just described a lot of good luck or maybe people are just attracted to your humility.
Eran Chen:
I don't know that it's true that things just come to me. But that I seize the opportunities in a very nimble way. The impact of architecture today on our wellbeing is absolutely, I believe, critical. And so acting within that complexity you can either be the sort of the macho architect that says, it's my way or the highway and I've got a vision of how we're going to change your life or you say it's very important to me in kind of in baby steps to improve what we do and that sense. I think I always see the opportunity in, every possibility because I think there's always a better way to do things. I was willing to do anything that has to do with design if I can make a small difference. People have mocked me, we didn't talk about this, but my first job as an architect I was a student in Israel was to design McDonald's restaurants in Tel Aviv. You didn't know that, right?
Ofer Cohen:
That's amazing.
Eran Chen:
My friend said, are you nuts? I mean, we as architects do not go and design McDonald's restaurants. And I said, why not? What's wrong with that? You can make a better restaurant. Maybe the experience of the people could be better. Maybe the way that it opens up to the street is better and I know, and that's sort of my set of mine and part of how I feel about my profession, which might seem humble, but I think it's not coming out of being humble, it's coming out of looking passionately at architecture and opportunity to improve people's life.
Ofer Cohen:
Eran's path mirrors that of some of the developers he's worked with in Brooklyn.
Eran Chen:
If you are a midsize developer or small developer, you need to find a different edge. You have to be more creative. And so by starting projects in Brooklyn, because the midsize and lower or smaller developers, you know, were active here. We've been able to bring creativity that brought success stories to those developers. And then some of the bigger guys looked back and said, hey, you know, that's interesting. Why can't we try to do it here? It's funny when I speak to Europeans because now we've, we spent a lot of time in Europe, they speak about Brooklyn more than they speak about Manhattan, right? It's something about the young, perculating exploding culture that Brooklyn projects outside to the world and I think it's an overlap of art and you know, sort of the free spirit of the young entrepreneurial, the idea that there's more offices and mixed-use projects in Brooklyn and people kind of see their lives today, you know, their mix of personal and professional life in a different way that we saw it 15- 20 years ago. And around the world, everybody's looking at similar problems, similar challenges. And it seems like Brooklyn has been developing these ideas because it can.
Ofer Cohen:
The rental development of the 10 block mega project that their former Rheingold brewery in Bushwick has tested Eran's creativity.
Eran Chen:
So there was literally a war where the neighborhood felt this is terrible. And I said, there's no way I can be successful doing what I do as an architect, bringing a huge building into this neighborhood. Everybody is going to just hate and resent and I said there's something wrong with that picture. So I felt the urge to be more involved and that's where I came up with the idea of OPEN, which is ODA public engagement in neighborhood. It's a non for profit organization that aims to basically connect better existing communities where we operate as architects to the act of change to the new buildings that are being developed and find a way to tie, because there's so many benefits in those new projects to them, find a way to tie those existing community to what we do. And the best way to do it I find is through art. So we've raised that about $400,000 and we used that money to collaborate with local artists in Bushwick and kids and other non for profits to do eight mega murals in and around the buildings and then eight sculptures in the public park. So at the end of it, you had the, I don't know, 150 kids that were part of the creation of the art within the project. Would make them attached personally to it and now they can walk in the neighborhood and point out and says, I did this. I thought about it. So that, that's extremely exciting. Beyond the fact that it's just incredible from a vision standpoint of it's like a museum, a mega-museum of street art, in the neighborhood that kind of invented in Brooklyn street art. It just feels like I'm a contributor. Although I don't live in Brooklyn for example, I feel like I belong to these neighborhoods. I feel so connected now to Bushwick. We need to push for in Brooklyn more and more is to put pressure on city planning to change the zoning and their attitude towards mixed-use projects. I mean people say that, but in practicality, I don't see enough of that coming from our administration. What I mean by that is we need to be able in many more neighborhoods to be able to build both office, residential and light industries, including cultural projects and school projects altogether. That would relieve the pressure of being reliant on Manhattan for work and that would bring more communities together because they can live and work at the same location.
Ofer Cohen:
I mean you talked about some proud moments, some sort of monumental moments in your career, but what are kind of like some of the achievements that you're most proud of when you look at everything you've done in Brooklyn in such, I mean, relatively short period of time.
Eran Chen:
You know, I think that the corridor of Fourth Avenue, for example, not too far from here, when we've started our first project there, it was a very iffy, you know, neighborhood and I think having a designed two buildings on Fourth Avenue and designing two more, we can bring a critical mass of developments, that are attractive enough that would establish that corridor as almost like the, you know, the Park Avenue of Brooklyn. I'm very proud also on our new building on Kent Avenue because there's something else that always kind of felt a bit shortcoming of the developments that are happening along the East River. There's a lot of them and I feel that there's a lot of sort of generic developments there are seen everywhere from Manhattan and from Brooklyn. And yet they didn't seize the opportunity to celebrate that. The location that they're at so being so prominent. With Elliot, we've been able to, create a building that not only caters, I think in a totally different way to people who wants to live in a high rise building on a waterfront, but also makes a sort of an architectural statement that says, Hey, we need to think differently like it or not, it's different. Design sells. Why? Because even in not only at the high-end, in the mid-end and even in the lower end, it's a generation that is thinking design, this is not the time in New York where you build it and they'll come just because people have no choice. You have to touch their heart, not only their pockets and demonstrate in your building that is something that you've done that would improve their lives and once you do that, you're going to get a return for your money.
Ofer Cohen:
Right. That's a great sales pitch, Eran Chen, thanks so much for coming to our studio.
Eran Chen:
Thanks for having me.
Ofer Cohen:
Only in Brooklyn, two Israeli guys speaking to each other for an hour in English.
Eran Chen:
How Fun is that?
Ofer Cohen:
It's really cool.
Eran Chen:
Very cool. Thank you for having me. It's been such a journey, I think, for both of us in so many ways that it's parallel and it's great to spend time with somebody like that. Thank you.
Ofer Cohen:
You're listening to Hey BK the podcast about the people behind Brooklyn's transformation. You can find us at heybk.nyc or wherever you get your podcasts. Please download and subscribe to our episodes. I'm Ofer Cohen. Thanks for listening.