Chad Oppenheim - Rethinking Architecture

Chad Oppenheim founded Oppenheim Architecture in 1999 to design a new kind of sensory, site-specific architecture. Working across scale, typology, and geography, every Oppenheim project is a sensitive contextual response guided by the philosophy that design follows life and form follows feeling. A graduate of Cornell University and a Fellow of the AIA, Oppenheim has served as lead designer for countless place-making assignments around the world.

Working closely with clients to realize and amplify their vision, he is backed by strong technical and project teams in Miami and Basel who execute large and complex projects on any continent. A traveler and cultural nomad from a young age, Oppenheim uncovers the power of a place to optimize how people live, play, or work in that particular environment. His monumental, timeless architecture enhances lives, realizes a site’s full potential, and protects and celebrates the natural environment. He shapes buildings and places to achieve the optimal balance between creativity and pragmatism, function and experience, construction and aesthetics.

Oppenheim has lectured widely and taught at various architecture schools, including Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and, most recently, Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. He has published two books – Spirit of Place (2018), a monograph about the practice featuring seven award-winning projects, and Lair: Radical Homes and Hideouts of Movie Villains (2019), an academic investigation into the cultural associations of modernist design with villainy in cinema.

Oppenheim’s international design practice has received over 90 industry awards, with more than 60 from the AIA, including the AIA’s highest distinction, the Silver Medal, as well as a 2018 National Design Award from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the 2023 American Prize for Architecture from the Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.