PROFILE
We invite people from a range of backgrounds, then when you start doing the creative work you leave your profession behind. It’s like a kind of role play
Kjetil Trædal Thorsen
Snøhetta’s founding partner talks about the expansion of SFMOMA, the September 11 Memorial Pavilion in New York and the importance of blurring professional borders. Rhianon Howells reports
G
iven Norway’s rich tradi- tion of folklore, the story of the naming of Snøhetta – the Oslo-based inte- grated design practice, embracing architecture, landscape architecture, interior design and brand
design – has a pleasing ring of mythology about it, despite being entirely true. In 1987, a number of young architects and landscape architects set themselves up in an attic studio above a popular Oslo beer hall called Dovrehallen, meaning Hall of the Dove. Dovre is a mountainous region of cen- tral Norway, so it followed that the collective should name themselves after its highest peak: Snøhetta. Two years later, one of the group’s members, Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, together with fellow architect Craig Dykers, founded the shareholding company Snøhetta Architecture and Landscape AS. As well as being a pun on the studio’s loca-
tion, the name reflected its core philosophy. A mountain, according to Thorsen, is both an object and a landscape, and therefore a per- fect representation of the firm’s commitment to integrating architecture and landscape architecture in a single design process.
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The founding of Snøhetta also marked the beginning of Thorsen’s professional ascent. After a childhood spent in Norway, Germany and England, he had studied architecture at the University of Technology in Graz, Austria, before moving to Oslo in 1985 to work as a freelance. Two years later, Snøhetta was born, and just two years after that, the firm won its first big commission: the Alexandria Library. With two main studios in Oslo and New York, the practice now employs more than 160 people from 28 different countries.
Why did you become an architect? My art O-level teacher at the secondary school I attended in England recommended I become an architect. I was interested in drawing, in art and in the sequence of produc- ing things, whatever they might be: models, painting, sculptures or scratchboards. I had a general interest in creating things, which led me to believe my teacher was right.
What were your aims when you set up Snøhetta? We had seen the need for collaboration between different professions dealing with our physical surroundings, such as urban- ism, public art, landscape architecture and
interior design. We were interested in trying to co-locate these disciplines in a profes- sion-free environment where there could be broader collaboration – especially, in the beginning, between landscape architecture and architecture. The idea was that the borders between the
professions would start to get a little more blurred, and one would influence the other. Landscape architecture would no longer just be the leftovers of whatever the architect did – the spaces between the buildings, filled with whatever was left of the budget. We started to look at more integrated ways of practising all the design disciplines related to our physical environment.
Is that something that is now more commonplace? Yes, absolutely. Since 1987, the search for more transprofessional ways of working and closer collaboration between different profes- sions has started to become more and more normal in everyday practice.
How does it work in practice? It’s a workshop-based process. We invite people from a range of professions from both within and outside Snøhetta, and sometimes
CLAD mag 2015 ISSUE 2
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