Jul 13, 2021

Oana Stănescu first got interested in architecture as a high school student in her hometown of Reșița, Romania. At the time she couldn’t imagine it could be a viable career option for a woman. But it turns out Stănescu has a knack for shattering norms. After graduating from the Polytechnic University of Timișoara, she would gain a second, global education interning at acclaimed architecture firm REX (formerly known as OMA New York, where she would meet her future partner Dong-Ping Wong), followed by stints in Tokyo, South Africa and Switzerland.

When she returned to work at OMA full-time, she met Kanye West, who commissioned the firm to design a seven-screen movie experience for “Cruel Summer” and, later, the sets for his Yeezus tour. She would leave OMA, though, to launch her own firm with Wong, Family New York, in 2009. From there she would rack up a dizzying number of collaborations, with everyone from Virgil Abloh, for whose Off-White flagship store she would rewrite the book on retail design, to Nike to the New Museum, to the Storefront for Art and Architecture and more.

After amicably dissolving Family New York, Stănescu started her own eponymous design studio and began teaching at Harvard and Columbia.

In a current collaboration with Abloh, Nóra Al Haider and the Legal Design Lab at Stanford University, she is working to rethink what architecture can do to humanize the justice system. With Wong and two other partners, Stănescu has secured permission from New York City to plonk an Olympic-sized plus-shaped pool in the East River that will filter more than 600,000 of polluted water every day. That should be completed in about two years and will float off the shore of Brooklyn Bridge Park.

But she hasn’t completely lost track of the ambitious girl from Reșița. One current project is following through on her 2007 thesis by designing a massive High Line-style elevated park through her native town. The thesis she wrote, as it happens, predated the opening of the New York High Line by two years.