Snøhetta – World Architecture: Former exhibition at DAC

The summer of 2015 the Danish Architecture Center were welcoming Snøhetta to Copenhagen. Snøhetta is a mountain in Norway – and the most talked-about architecture firm in Scandinavia.

Their most famous building is the iceberg-like Oslo Opera House located in the downtown area of the city, but they are worth getting to know for lots of other reasons. Their holistic and social democratic approach to architecture resonates in Seoul, New York and Copenhagen.

The story about Snøhetta

Snøhetta was founded in the 1980s, when a group of both building and landscape architects joined forces to form a community that embraced their two fields and created cohesion between buildings and landscapes. From the beginning, Snøhetta was based on the collective, and contrary to many other architecture firms, it is not named after its founder. The name is inspired by the location of the apartment where Snøhetta was founded. It was located upstairs from a bar called Dovrehallen, and since Dovre is a mountain range in Norway where the tallest mountain is named Snøhetta, it was an easy choice to make.

Oslo Opera House

Snøhetta is known primarily for building the Oslo Opera House which is quite characteristic for their work. It connects architecture with the landscape and nature that surrounds it, and it is democratic in its expression, having opened up the opera house to a new audience who come here to spend time on the big roof overlooking the fiord.

The firm also did the addition to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as well as the urban space renewal of Times Square in New York, and they designed the new Norwegian bank notes and a cultural center in Saudi Arabia called the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture. Furthermore, their first project in Denmark were an addition to the art museum of Ordrupgaard north of Copenhagen.