In dialogue with nature

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 name 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 real mountain massif of Dovre. Secondly, it was a landscape reference, a strong and visible mountain in a pivoting 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. This was intended to be a true transprofessional collective with a name that would trigger the imagination of interpretations at a point in time when we knew nothing about the future. It was all about the projects. And a name matters. 

We started as a collective of equal professions, fed up with the idea that landscape architecture was a leftover discipline, only to be realized after most of the efforts and money had been spent on the construction of a building. Our strategy was to try to create architecture and landscape architecture within one and the same concept. We wanted to create dependencies in the design and give our clients a kind of “take it or leave it” ultimatum. One could not be realized without the other.

Another important event had also taken place in 1987: Former–and the first female–Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland’s UN report, Our Common Future, had just been released. To our knowledge, it was the first time social, environmental, and economic sustainability had been formulated with such thoroughness and with 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 this 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. This foundation contributes to more equal conditions for living, health, and employment.

Accessibility to nature was also part of our heritage and is a great privilege, especially to people living in the Nordic countries. Here, 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 backbones. In Norway, everyone is free to roam in nature. An ancient custom, now protected by Norwegian law through alle­mannsretten (Norwegian for the right to roam) ensures the freedom to move unrestricted throughout 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 has inspired several of our projects since including some of our so-called keyless structures, such as the 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 the pavilion belongs to nature and the animals, and that we humans are only allowed to observe from a safe distance.

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, connecting elements–water, earth, air, and sky.

The Library of Alexandria (Alexandria, Egypt, completed 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 meters in diameter and reaches up to 32 meters in height, while diving 12 meters 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. 

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 your 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 facade. If you can touch it, you can own it.

In later years, we have adopted this thinking into the other disciplines added to our transdisciplinary practice, which–in addition to architecture and landscape–now also includes interior, product, brand & experience design, and art.

As Snøhetta now operates globally, we recognize that public accessibility and nature, unfortunately, are not a privilege for all. While 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, 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 benefiting 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.

In the busy city of Tokyo, Japan, the mixed-use project Shibuya Upper West is expected to complete 2029 and includes terraced green spaces for visitors. 

Bangkok has one of the lowest amounts of public green space per capita in Asia. The 250.000 m2 mixed-use project Cloud 11 will provide the public with an urban green lung, including elevated gardens with a big central lawn, which will become the largest of its kind in Thailand, as well as a series of pocket parks. 

While closeness to nature was intuitively right for us from the start, today, there is much research to prove nature's positive effect on our health.

In the peaceful ambiance of the forests, only a short walking distance from two of Norway's largest hospitals, Snøhetta has designed two secluded wooden shelters aspiring to make hospitalization easier for patients and their families. Designed for the Friluftssykehuset Foundation, the Outdoor Care Retreats offer visitors a physical and psychological respite from stringent treatment regimens and the isolation that often follows long-term hospitalization.

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 tranquillity, 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, 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.

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 percent of global emissions. We, therefore, have a responsibility to minimize our direct and indirect environmental impacts. We need to see these challenges as inspiration not as limitation to our design process. Our design choices are vital in shaping the environmental footprint of the buildings, spaces and products we design, which provide great opportunities. 

As occupants of lands, we are also part of 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 the 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 our learnings from the past to try to do even better in the next.