Snøhetta takes its name from a mountain in central Norway, a remote summit in the Dovrefjell massif steeped in history and deeply rooted in the country’s imagination. The studio has turned that choice into a statement of principle. Snøhetta is, in its own words, “a place nobody is from, but anyone can experience”. From this idea springs the motivation that runs through all its work: to create places where societies can connect with one another and with the world around them, a task the studio entrusts to dialogue and diversity.
Founded in Oslo in the late 1980s by Kjetil Trædal Thorsen and Craig Dykers, the studio came into being just as Our Common Future was published, the report of the United Nations Brundtland Commission that introduced the notion of sustainable development. For its founders, that document was an early inspiration to build a positive future, at a time when such a concern was still unusual within the profession. Ever since, environmental and cultural sensitivity has framed the way the studio understands its craft, along with its conviction that design can be a transformative force.
Its first major commission came in 1989, with the competition for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which brought the legendary library of Alexandria back to life. It was followed by the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet in Oslo, whose walkable roof above the fjord became a symbol of contemporary public architecture, and by the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion at the World Trade Center in New York. Building on these foundational works, the studio has gone on to realise internationally acclaimed projects around the globe.
Projects at every scale
Snøhetta defines itself as a transdisciplinary, dialogue-driven practice that brings together architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture, art and product design, often combining several of these disciplines within a single project. While its large cultural works tend to draw the spotlight, the studio works with equal interest across very different scales, from a bird nest or a beehive to urban master planning, by way of cultural, scientific and commercial buildings. It has designed and produced tables, chairs, paving and new low-impact building materials.
The team, some 250 people from forty nations, is spread across seven studios in Oslo, New York, Innsbruck, Paris, Melbourne, Hong Kong and Shenzhen. This diversity reflects a wish to represent the societies and cultures in which it works. The organisation is horizontal, and information flows openly between colleagues. The studios themselves, open and welcoming, translate this culture into space: non-hierarchical floor plans where everyone, whatever their role or profession, shares the same workshop, designed for focused thinking as much as for exchange.
The method: an integrated approach
Every project is unique, with its own clients, users, budgets, contexts and constraints. At the centre of Snøhetta’s method lies an integrated approach grounded in one conviction: bringing together people with different perspectives and skills is a catalyst for innovation. The studio calls this process transpositioning, an exchange of positions in which each professional steps into the other’s territory. The process is often opened up to outside participants through workshops that invite them to let go of the conventions of their own discipline, a practice that widens the range of possible solutions, frees the team from habitual thinking and builds empathy among everyone involved.
From this comes one of the most recognised qualities of its work: the ability to find unexpected solutions to the challenges of each commission. The studio aims to “take reality by surprise” through a continuous state of reinvention, and believes that these innovations only gain value when they are shared, until yesterday’s experiment becomes today’s standard.
Traditional craft and digital technology
Snøhetta’s method explores traditional handicraft and cutting-edge digital technology side by side, in a complementary relationship that drives its creative process. At the heart of its studios are model workshops equipped with CNC robots, 3D rapid prototyping, woodworking machinery and hand tools. Prototyping thus becomes part of the design process itself, and ideas move seamlessly between the analogue and digital worlds. In these workshops, abstract ideas are put to the test, elements that have never been joined before are assembled, and the qualities of each material — its weight, its smell, everything it holds — are examined so that what is learned can feed back into the project.
Sustainability as ethics
Aware that buildings and their construction contribute decisively to climate change, Snøhetta’s teams approach each project with a commitment to building responsibly and to creating places where people, plants and animals can coexist. Its sustainability philosophy rests on three pillars — social, environmental and economic — and is aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. The studio has set itself the goal of making all its projects carbon-neutral within the next fifteen years.
This ambition is underpinned by decades of research. Snøhetta has experimented with energy-positive buildings, capable of paying back their carbon footprint over their lifetime by returning clean energy to society, and has shown that they can be built with existing technology; its aim now is to extend this strategy across its entire portfolio and, ultimately, to the construction industry as a whole. Together with research institutions, it studies materials such as plastic, clay, wood and various low-carbon concretes, and shares its findings with the industry as the results come in. Its attention to place embraces the whole habitat, with its soils, vegetation, flora and fauna, and extends to water management, the control of emissions and waste, and healthy working conditions both on site and throughout the design process.
Recognition
The studio’s trajectory has been honoured with some of the most significant awards in the discipline. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and the Oslo Opera House the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award. Snøhetta has also received the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, the A.C. Houens Fond Diploma and the Grosch Medal. In 2016, WSJ. Magazine named it Architecture Innovator of the Year, and Fast Company has twice in a row listed it among the world’s most innovative companies.
In 2020 it received the National Design Award for Architecture, granted by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, as well as Design and Architecture Norway’s Honorary Award for Under, its underwater restaurant on Norway’s southern coast. Its Forite tiles, made from recycled glass, were recognised by Dezeen and Wallpaper* in 2021 and 2022, and the wayfinding system for the Le Monde Group headquarters in Paris won a Monocle Design Award.
In spring 2027, Thames & Hudson will publish its monograph Context and Concept: Selected Works worldwide, with the Shanghai Grand Opera House on the cover. That this building should be chosen to present more than three decades of work says a great deal about the path travelled since Alexandria: an architecture that, in every place and at every scale, insists on opening its doors to anyone who wishes to walk through them.