Login
Registered users
As the new year races ahead in an increasingly unpredictable world, many of us are probably pausing to reflect. How do we find meaning in what is happening in the world right now? How can we use our professions as designers and architects to contribute to a positive impact; create spaces in which people connect, belong, thrive, and are at one with nature? Can we help provide some answers to the many potent challenges we face today? Or are we naïve to think we can?
Every day, we are confronted with news about wars, widespread climate change, a growing disparity between the wealthy and the poor, urban segregation, and health problems caused by passive lifestyles, spending too much time indoors or too much time alone. These are daunting tasks for any profession to take on.
Yet, 40 years after I completed my architecture studies in Graz, Austria, I still firmly believe that design and architecture can contribute to meaningful change. In a time of unrest, standing by our values and core beliefs is more important than ever. We need to keep challenging ourselves, strive to create a positive impact, project by project, and have a long-term perspective with future generations in mind.
To illustrate this – some might say, ambitious – belief, I invite you to join me on a journey back in time to the origins of Snøhetta and the birth of our conceptual thinking that guided our development, where connection to nature and our surroundings became a driving force.
A Name Matters
It all started in 1987 when an unruly group of architects and landscape architects co-located in an office space in Oslo under the name of Snøhetta. The name was, in fact, a bit of a joke at the time, but it came to have a significant impact on us. The word had three associative considerations. Firstly, it referred to the brown bar and restaurant below our attic space in Storgata named “Dovrehallen”, Snøhetta being the highest peak in the Dovre mountain massif. Secondly, it was a landscape reference, a highly visible mountain in a pivotal location in Norway. Thirdly, Dovre had a series of annotations and mysteries connected to its name. As a collective, we were very conscious about choosing a name that did not belong to any one person. We wanted to be a truly trans-professional collective whose name triggered many interpretations at a time when we knew nothing about what the future would bring. We were all about the projects. So, a name mattered.
Since those early days, Snøhetta has regularly travelled to the mountain that lent us its name to connect with nature and each other. What started as a hike for a small group of people to the top of the mountain has now evolved into a biannual cultural event for Snøhetta’s employees worldwide. The walk to the top or along the lower parts of the mountain area symbolizes our strong belief that our intentions when first choosing the name as a sign of our physical connection to the landscape are still intact.
Walking and talking are ways to understand that creativity is not only about the brain but about using your whole body. As Laurie Anderson says in her song Walking and Falling:
“You’re walking. And you don’t always realize it, but you’re always falling. With each step you fall forward slightly. And then catch yourself from falling”.
Today, it feels as if the mountain Snøhetta has unconsciously influenced our ways, but maybe we have also had a small part in influencing other people’s perceptions of Snøhetta.
Our Common Future
We started as a collective of professionals fed up with the idea that landscape architecture was a leftover discipline, only realized after most of the effort and money had been spent on constructing a building. Our strategy was to try to create architecture and landscape architecture as one single concept. We wanted to create dependencies in the design proposed, giving our clients a kind of “take it or leave it” ultimatum. One could not be realized without the other.
Moreover, 1987 was marked by another important event: the release of the UN report Our Common Future by Norway’s former – and first female – Prime Minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland. To our knowledge, it was the first time social, environmental, and economic sustainability had been formulated with such thoroughness and had such an impact on future policies.
Our group felt, maybe even intuitively, that this report was also seminal for cross-collaboration within our own professions. There seemed to be a possibility to translate the content of the report directly into architectural designs of our physical surroundings. Social, environmental, and economic sustainability became themes to translate into designs.
Perhaps the fact that most of us came from and were based in Norway made us more receptive to the content in this report. Equality and accessibility were the cornerstones of our primary education, embodying Norway’s commitment to a societal model built on tax-financed health and welfare services and free education. It is the foundation of more equal conditions for living, health, and employment.
The Right to Roam
Accessibility to nature is also part of our heritage and a great privilege, especially to people living in Nordic countries. We are surrounded by nature on all sides; we can swim in the sea, walk in the woods or climb the mountains, which in turn become an implicit part of our way of life. In Norway, everyone is free to roam in nature. An ancient custom, now protected by the Norwegian law allemannsretten (Norwegian for “the right to roam”) ensures the freedom to move unrestricted in nature, as long as you act responsibly, tread lightly, and leave no trace.
Taking all this into account, which perhaps somewhat subconsciously felt like the right direction, led us to explore the relationship between people, nature, and the built environment. Blending the boundaries between indoors and outdoors became a common thread through our designs.
This early thinking inspired several of our projects including some of our so-called keyless structures, such as Viewpoint Snøhetta, the Norwegian Wild Reindeer Pavilion (Hjerkinn, Norway, completed in 2011). The pavilion overlooks the Snøhetta mountain and the surrounding national park, providing visitors with a resting place and a warm shelter from harsh weather conditions. It also serves as a reminder that the area beyond belongs to nature and the animals, and that we humans are only allowed to observe from a safe distance.
Contextual Conceptualism
The early Snøhetta projects became hybrids where we discussed and challenged typologies to explore the relationship between the architecture and the surroundings. Central to this was the principle of crossing boundaries, underground to overground, under water to over water, and connecting elements – water, earth, air, and sky.
The Library of Alexandria (Egypt, completed in 2001) is one of the most defining examples of this early hybrid way of thinking. Characterized by its circular, tilting form, the building spans
160 m in diameter and reaches up to 32 m in height, while diving 12 m into the ground. To ensure the library is a space all citizens can use, it is surrounded by an open public plaza with a reflecting pool.
Following this, the Oslo Opera House was built on piles in the Oslo fjord, abutting reclaimed land that extends Oslo’s harbor, giving more of the city’s waterfront space back to everyone, not just to those who attend a performance. Applying the idea of the right to roam to the exterior of the building, the roof and plaza make up a large active public space that rises from the sea and where landscape and architecture become synonymous.
Challenging typologies has since become a method to continue to explore these relationships when working with our projects. Is it a landscape or a house? If it is an object, how does it relate to its environment? Our contextual thinking was born from these explorations and has guided us ever since. Looking back, I am glad we did not immerse ourselves in a typical direction of style back then. A specific style repeated over time would have defined us and limited our thinking and future direction. Instead, we refer to our approach and philosophy as contextual conceptualism, which means all our projects may look very different.
We are more interested in the contextual conditions that reflect how design develops and how it relates to a certain place. On the one hand, this means looking at the place, the time, the site and the situation, while on the other, using this information to conceptualize what we are going to do in the future. It is not about style or esthetics per se but how the latter develops from this context and shapes the concept for each project.
This means the Oslo Opera House can only look like it does where it is because of its specific context. Its crossing lines between water and sky are only possible because of its location. Being able to walk on the roof would not work in the same way in Saudi Arabia, for example, where the contextual conditions led us to design an opera house as a cluster of buildings, creating open and shaded spaces for the public instead.
The Art of Prepositions
Perhaps an intimate and tangible relationship to the landscape and surroundings is the most descriptive way to explain our conceptual thinking. Developing our thinking more consciously led us to call architecture the “art of prepositions”, meaning your relationship to an object or the surroundings depends on where your body is located in relation to it. Are you inside, over, in front, behind? The fewer prepositions you employ to describe the human relationship to an object, the larger the distance between them. The more prepositions, the closer and more intimate this relationship will be. By walking on the Opera roof, for example, we added an extra preposition to just being inside or outside, which adds to the intimacy and relationship between us and the building. The roof became a fifth façade. If you can touch it, you can own it.
In later years, we have adopted this thinking in the other disciplines, adding it to our transdisciplinary practice, which – in addition to architecture and landscape – now also includes interior, product, graphic and digital design and art.
As Snøhetta now operates globally, we have to recognize that public accessibility and nature are not a privilege for all but since all projects are contextual, we can still do things in each project to increase accessibility. Each program and project should be challenged rigorously to explore what is possible and what will benefit the people using it and the wider public in general. According to research,1 we spend an average of 90% of our time indoors, so by bringing parts of nature closer or creating an attraction to go outdoors will have a great effect, physically and psychologically. If we do this right, we might even sensitize the public, empowering people to make decisions that benefit our common future.
For example, in dense cities in Asia, where nature or public spaces are rare, we have made a conscious choice to add public green spaces as part of our urban projects.
Healing Architecture
While closeness to nature was intuitively right for us from the start, today, much research has now shown nature’s positive effect on our health.
A recent study by professor Åshild Lappegard Hauge from the University of Oslo highlights the significant impact of the physical environment on quality of life, particularly for vulnerable groups. Hauge emphasizes that well-designed spaces can enhance mental health by promoting social interactions, nature access, and physical activity. She notes that architecture mimicking nature can foster tranquility, while poorly maintained buildings may signal low value, affecting both residents and staff.
Hauge and research fellow Eli Kindervaag studied the Outdoor Care Retreat cabin near Oslo’s National Hospital (a sister building exists in Kristiansand), designed by Snøhetta, where children can have a break from the hospital surroundings during treatment together with their families. Their research indicates that therapy in this natural setting is more effective than in traditional hospitals, leading to happier and more engaged patients, which again leads to faster recovery.
Inspiration, Not Limitation
Today, almost 40 years since we started, the themes and values we founded Snøhetta on feel more relevant than ever. Over the years, our philosophy and design approach has gradually evolved, and social and environmental sustainability is now a defined and core strategy in our company and all studios worldwide.
As part of the building and construction industry, we are in a dilemma. The sector is a major polluter and accounts for at least 37% of global emissions. We, therefore, have a responsibility to minimize our direct and indirect environmental impacts. We need to see these challenges as an inspiration not as a limitation to our design process. Our design choices are vital in shaping the environmental footprint of the buildings and spaces we design, which give us great opportunities.
As occupants of the land, we also contribute to changing the natural landscape, which is then lost. So, in those cases, there must be another positive angle to weigh up the wrongs, such as a positive impact on people and society in general or creating buildings and spaces that give back more than they take. Through a number of projects, we have explored how this can be achieved, including the energy-positive prototype Harvard HouseZero, the Powerhouses – a series of buildings that produce more energy than they consume over a lifespan – and Vertikal Nydalen, Norway’s first naturally climatized mixed-use building, to name a few.
We might not be able to do everything right in every project yet, but we can use what we have learned to try to do even better in the next.
Emissions are part of the entire building lifecycle, from sourced raw materials, transport, construction, energy demand during building use and maintenance through demolition and deconstruction, and finally recycling or reuse. Our design choices have a significant impact on what type of materials are used as well as their quantity, how far they are transported, energy efficiency and use throughout the building’s life cycle. The built environment also plays an important role in shaping how we adapt to climate change: as it intensifies, integrating climate-resilient design strategies is imperative to ensure societies and communities’ longevity, safety, and adaptability.
There are no absolute conclusions about how our professions need to evolve, yet the overriding principle must be for my generation of designers and architects to leave the planet in a better condition for people and nature than when we became active. This is demanding and leaves us with no other option than long-term thinking and short-term action.
As my grandfather told me as a child, when you are out hiking in nature, you need to look down so as not to stumble, look forward to get direction, look to the sky to dream, and sometimes look back to see where you came from. If you do not move your head accordingly, you may assume you are promenading rather than hiking. Right now, we need to be hiking.
Malachowsky Hall, University of Florida
Bohlin Cywinski Jackson
In the Highlights column, Michael Webb looks at Malachowsky Hall in Gainesville, designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson...
Casa 720
Fernanda Canales
In this issue’s Letter from America column, Raymund Ryan talks about Fernanda Canales’ Casa 720 in Tehuastepec, Mexico...
Expo 2025
Philip Jodidio explores Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan...
