On May 28, the time has come: BAUMEISTER Curated 2021 will be published. Who curated the B6 together with us? None other than Snøhetta from Norway. Baumeister editor-in-chief Fabian Peters spoke to Snøhetta founding partner Kjetil Trædal Thorsen about the joint issue and the work at Snøhetta shortly before the issue went to print. Fabian Peters: Kjetil, what made you […]
On May 28, the time has come: BAUMEISTER Curated 2021 will be published. Who curated the B6 together with us? None other than Snøhetta from Norway. Baumeister editor-in-chief Fabian Peters spoke to Snøhetta founding partner Kjetil Trædal Thorsen about the joint issue and the work at Snøhetta shortly before the issue went to print.
Fabian Peters: Kjetil, what attracted you to curate an issue of Baumeister?
Kjetil Trædal Thorsen: Baumeister is a very good and recognized magazine that reaches a lot of people. It has given us a platform to invite people from our team and give them a voice. As a result, the magazine takes on different perspectives, which makes it very lively and varied. The artist Andrea Lüth has also illustrated it with graphics. In my opinion, the magazine will really be a very special issue. The best thing, of course, is that you let us do it at all.
Fabian Peters: In your essay at the beginning of the magazine, you write that every single project at Snøhetta always begins with a very elaborate process of contextualization. I found that interesting and wondered how you deal with the complexity that inevitably results from this extensive contextualization?
Kjetil Trædal Thorsen: If we understand context in a broader sense, it’s not necessarily just about a limited understanding of a historical or cultural context, but rather we can examine an aspect in great detail, such as looking at a particular individual flower. It can be something peculiar and unique. I sometimes use the example that to get an idea of a highway, most people would want to know how many cars are on that highway.
But we can just as well just look at the question of how many red or blue cars are driving on this highway. In other words, we take our explorations in a slightly different direction and look at how we would interpret a place in the future. The distinction between the subjective and the objective is, as you know, difficult to make in architecture. We try to subjectivize the objective truths. To gradually frame the reinvention of a place, or we introduce a new context in which a possible future use or architecture can take place.
To a certain extent, complexity itself is a result and we do not necessarily have to simplify this complexity, at least not in a populist way. Rather, it is about understanding the core of these complexities so that we can, in effect, conceptualize some aspects of this broader, deeper and contextual consideration. That is, we simplify in terms of an understanding that moves us forward so that we can develop a design for that place or location. It’s an ongoing process of evaluating existing information and context, how that context is interpreted and how it can inform the concept for a potential design.
Fabian Peters: Are architects prepared for such a task at university? Do they learn this form of contextualization there or do you have to teach them this when they start working for Snøhetta?
Kjetil Trædal Thorsen: It varies from university to university. At the moment we have employees from more than 14 countries in our various offices. One aspect of the idea is that you approach the task from different directions. You know that if you want to understand the mountain, you have to climb it from different sides. If we compare a project to a mountain, then the same applies. We need people to climb the mountain from different sides. Some beginners already know the deeper implications of a contextual reading and analysis, some do not. And not everyone needs to be able to do this. It’s not that everyone has to be able to do everything. What is much more important to us are the collective contributions from different directions that flow together and in the end we have a design, an object or a landscape.
In my opinion, this is essential and a more positive form of approach, because the reality is that sometimes it is also an advantage not to know something. Not in a naïve way, but simply because certain priorities are sometimes overridden by prior knowledge. As a result, other parts of a knowledge base are sometimes lost – a holistic understanding, for example, a deeper intuition, or the ability to arrive at solutions through associative thinking. All of these aspects come together in a very complicated way. So, to answer the question: If someone would like to learn to understand the deeper contextual situation of a place, then of course we teach them that. If they don’t have that interest, then we don’t.
Fabian Peters: In the Baumeister issue you curated, you describe that Snøhetta starts from a very broad concept of culture. Does this also apply to your idea of beauty and art?
Kjetil Trædal Thorsen: Beauty is ultimately something that has to be expressed. And if the tools are not available to give expression to the imagined beauty, then the result cannot do justice to the idea. To a certain extent, then, beauty is always the result of the means at our disposal. The basis for this is partly intuitive and partly acquired. At Snøhetta, we are always guided by the question of how our architecture will affect people. Many things play a role in this: the proportions, the materials used, the movement of light in the room or shadows on the outside. A clear conceptual idea from which a form has been developed can also lend it beauty. These are all aspects in the evaluation of beauty. There is not just one beauty, but countless forms of beauty in this world. I like the idea that architecture is beautiful when it blossoms.
However, the day a building opens may not be the day it blossoms. Its use can turn it into a beautiful object, and the subsequent use of a project can also transform it into a beautiful object. A sense of beauty is not immutable. Beauty is not found in a particular style, as Donald Trump apparently believes, who had this sudden inspiration that all government buildings should be neoclassical or Georgian. Rather, it comes from using your heart, your mind, your whole body to create something that touches the soul of other people.
“Because the egalitarian elements of Western culture, I think, fundamentally correspond to a natural humanity.”
Fabian Peters: What role do cultural traditions such as the history of European art and architecture play in your work?
Kjetil Trædal Thorsen: I think we are all children of our respective environments. I was born and raised in a truly social democratic country. I can’t help but carry some of these values with me when I work anywhere in the world. It would simply be a lie if I said that I felt Egyptian while I was working in Egypt. That was not the case, I was still Norwegian. That’s why I believe that there are certain humanistic aspects that you have to take to heart in architecture.
In the case of the library in Alexandria, for example, we said from the outset that we definitely wanted to prevent workers from suffering fatal accidents during construction work on the site. We therefore ensured greater safety on the construction site – in the form of hard hats, protective footwear, clean water and toilets, thereby improving the basic conditions on site. At the same time, it was important to us to ensure that the end result was accessible to the public, even though fifty percent of the population is illiterate. We insisted that the library be open to the public. The social aspects, trying to ensure that European values are taken to heart, these are things we always fight for. Because the egalitarian elements of Western culture are, I think, fundamentally in line with a natural humanity.
“Norway has brought nature into architecture”
Fabian Peters: Beyond social democratic traditions: What other influence has Norway had on your understanding of architecture?
Kjetil Trædal Thorsen: In my view, the history of ideas, which began with Sverre Fehn or the theories of Christian Norberg-Schulz, plays a key role in determining how we in Norway today as architects view a given situation and which factors we attach importance to. In my opinion, Norway has brought nature into architecture – the close connection between an understanding of nature and the realization of the enormous contribution that nature can make to architecture.
Fabian Peters: Nature plays a strikingly important role in your architecture. In many of your projects, you have used forms that refer directly to natural phenomena. What prompted you to do this?
Kjetil Trædal Thorsen: Throughout history, there are countless examples of nature’s influence on design, whether in the form of ornamentation or other things. We have taken a new path. What we want to discuss in our architecture is the question. What we find in nature beyond flora and fauna that is different from everything else. Little by little, we have developed the theory. The location of the body in nature can be described by prepositions, as they occur in every language. This led to my conviction that the more localizations of the body are possible, the closer architecture comes to nature. In other words, it is about the question of where you are in relation to something, whether you are in front of, behind, under or between something.
We have developed the idea that architecture is the art of prepositions. Nature is the place of all prepositions. It’s always about the position of the body in relation to something else. For me, this was one of the most important factors in the development of our typology of nature-based architectural projects.
“That is, the object itself is an interpretation of a particular place.”
Fabian Peters: Can you perhaps give an example to describe this?
Kjetil Trædal Thorsen: Take the opera house in Oslo, for example, where you can go up to the roof of the opera house. As far as I know, this is the first time that you can go up and not just into the opera. A new preposition has arisen here that refers to the object. Suddenly you experience this extension of the position of your own body in the city. In modern architecture there is a long tradition of inside and outside. But there is no tradition of in-between, of below or above. Such things arise when you begin to interpret landscapes.
It is not necessarily about structures and forms, but rather about the position of the body. Since we started in 1987 as a working group for architecture and landscape design and then founded the company in 1989 after the library project in Alexandria, this has been the driving force behind our work. And this in turn had a connection to the object: the library in Alexandria is located below, on and above the surface of the earth. In other words, the object itself is an interpretation of a specific location. Just like the underwater restaurant Under, the opera house in Oslo or the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture – Ithra, in Saudi Arabia.
Fabian Peters: Perhaps the most important task of architecture is to offer people shelter. You have repeatedly built shelters in Norway’s harsh nature, where the aim was precisely to provide people with shelter. On the other hand, opening up to nature plays an important role in your buildings. What is the relationship between these two aspects of your architecture?
Kjetil Trædal Thorsen: A good example in this context is the Wild Reindeer Pavilion, which illustrates very well how we deal with the aspects of protection and openness to nature. In such situations, a bridge is often created between nature itself and human activity.
Where is the line that separates individual or collective activity from the large-scale complex situations in nature? I think our buildings illustrate these boundaries very well. This is particularly clear in our Lascaux project in France, for example. It is precisely embedded in a depression in the terrain between the fields and the forest. It is this boundary that we are opening up and this is exactly what we are primarily concerned with. The building is located exactly in the transition between the national park and an area that is not protected.
We try to design these transitional elements with the utmost care; ultimately, they are what make us open or close a building to its surroundings. In a deeper sense, nature helps us, indeed it shows us how we should best deal with it. It shows us where we need to open or close something.
“How can you use your position in a positive way to make architecture better than it is today?”
Fabian Peters: You do a lot of research into the impact of architecture on nature. Climate change is an extremely important topic for you. Is there a conflict between your claim to environmental protection and the expectations of your customers?
Kjetil Trædal Thorsen: Yes and no. This is a very important question and there is undoubtedly a certain dilemma. From the beginning, we tried to focus on the collective aspects with the office; we didn’t want this form of individualized architecture and that’s why we gave ourselves the name Snøhetta. Snøhetta is now certainly in a position where it can have a stronger influence than was previously the case. This raises the question of what kind of responsibility should follow from this position, given greater fame and an increased volume of commissions and a closer relationship with one’s environment? How true can you still be to your most important convictions? And how can you use this position in a positive way to make architecture better than it is today? That is difficult. To be honest, the world is not made up of clients who always agree with everything we propose.
“In that sense, we are climate optimists.”
An important question for us so far has been and will continue to be how we can actually build in a more climate-friendly way. That is a very, very big task. It’s not just about building only CO2-neutral buildings, but even CO2-negative buildings in the future. Buildings that are based on an energy mix that results from how energy is produced and how the energy is used to produce the materials – in contrast to the reductionist view of materials and their use. The dilemma now is to push and defend this claim with all consistency, while of course being aware that this does not always happen everywhere. This means we have to be very ambitious.
In this sense, we are climate optimists. We believe that it is possible to produce CO2-neutral concrete through research and innovation; to use wood while planting trees and replanting forests around the world; or to redirect clean and renewable energy to local sources; or to plan the transmission of digital media more locally so that data does not have to be transmitted over such long distances. All of these aspects come together and can play a role in talking to the people who actually make the decisions. We have the impression that we are now better positioned for this with our climate projects.
There is a lot of interest in this. More and more people are becoming aware that we need knowledge in order to be able to construct such buildings in the future. We need examples that illustrate in real time what they can actually do and how they work. We are already very advanced in this respect. While we want to defend our brand and leverage our position worldwide, we also have a responsibility to drive things forward. Of course, we are still a long way from reaching our goal, there is still a lot to do.
Fabian Peters: Will adaptations and refurbishments play a greater role at Snøhetta in the future?
Kjetil Trædal Thorsen: This is actually already the case. In cities like Paris, a large part of our work consists of restoring buildings or implementing extensions. Examples of this are the Musée Carnavalet or the Musée de la Marine in Paris. We mainly carry out renovation work here, including in listed buildings, which need to be treated with particular care. But this should only be done in places where something really needs to be preserved. From a social point of view, I think it is unjustified to preserve things in places where there is nothing to preserve. We will have to adapt our thought patterns somewhat in the future. It is to be expected that people in other parts of the world will also want to have the comforts that we in Europe and the western world have already enjoyed for many, many years.
It would be wrong to say: “Take care of what already exists” on the assumption that this would perhaps lead to us becoming happy and truly environmentally friendly. After all, it’s not the poorer countries that are polluting the world; it’s us as consumers. In the western world, we should therefore be keen to conserve, reuse and recycle what we have. In certain parts of the world, this advantage does not exist. And we need to make sure that we don’t override the other positions.
You can watch the whole interview as a video and in English here.
The B6/21 curated by Snøhetta is available here in German and here in English.
Do youknow our other curated issues? Discover our entire BAUMEISTER Curated series with MVRDV, Reinier de Graaf, David Adjaye and many more here.
By the way: On our BAUMEISTER Instagram account you can stay up to date on all the exciting insights and events of Curated with Snøhetta.
