Snøhetta named Innovator of the Year

The Wall Street Journal has announced Snøhetta as the WSJ Magazine 2016 Architecture Innovator of the Year.
Founding Partners Craig Dykers and Kjetil Trædal Thorsen were presented the award by artist and musician Laurie Anderson at the sixth annual awards ceremony on November 2, 2016. Snøhetta joins this year’s list of honorees that includes Ai Weiwei (Art), Es Devlin (Design), Daniel Humm & Will Guidara (Food), Melinda Gates (Philanthropy), Tom Ford (Film), and The Weeknd (Music).
WSJ Magazine profiles the practice in the November 2016 issue, writing that Snøhetta “has flouted architectural norms to become one of the world’s most sought-after firms.” New photography of the Snøhetta-designed Norwegian Wild Reindeer Pavilion captured by photographer Adrian Gaut accompanies the piece penned by Ian Volner, who writes: “For far longer than perhaps any other firm working today, Snøhetta has been ‘saying no to any ultimate design theory,’ as Dykers puts it, touting instead an architecture free of banner slogans and signature styles. This can make it difficult to get a clear picture of what Snøhetta is really up to. But it’s also what makes the firm so interesting to watch.”
The late architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in 2010 for the Wall Street Journal that “what Snøhetta practices could be called the architecture of engagement, a building conceived as a social and environmental act instead of a static, formal object.”
For over 25 years, Snøhetta has designed some of the world’s most notable public and cultural projects. Snøhetta kick-started its career in 1989 with the competitionwinning entry for the new library of Alexandria, Egypt. This was later followed by the commission for the Norwegian National Opera in Oslo, the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion at the World Trade Center in New York City, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Expansion in California, among many others. Since its inception, the practice has maintained its original trans-disciplinary approach, integrating architectural, landscape, interior and brand design in all of its projects.
Snøhetta is currently working on a number of projects internationally including the Times Square Reconstruction in New York, the Lascaux IV Caves Museum in France, the Le Monde Headquarters in Paris, the ongoing Masterplan for Penn Plaza in Manhattan, and a series net zero energy projects globally. Snøhetta’s competitionwinning design for Norway’s new bank notes will go into circulation in 2017, and its design for the future Willamette Falls Riverwalk in Oregon City is in development.

Image: rendering of the Lascaux IV Caves Museum in Montignac, France , courtesy Snøhetta