Snøhetta for Playboy
IKEA was founded in Sweden in 1943. In 2008 it became the world’s largest furniture retailer and has held that title ever since. There are 403 IKEA stores spread across 49 countries and it keeps 95 percent of its product range standard, which means that you can buy the exact same BILLY bookcase in Ekaterinburg, Russia as you can in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, and Frisco, Texas. It’s joked that one in ten Europeans was conceived in an IKEA bed.
This ubiquity of Scandinavian design has spawned a global cult of minimalism and all things Nordic, making Scandinavian aesthetics one of the few unchanging factors in an increasingly turbulent world. Amid this fever for all things clean and functional, the Norway-based architecture office Snøhetta has quietly been winning some of the most prestigious contracts in the world.
The accolades started in 1989 with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The building—the spiritual heir to the legendary Library of Alexandria in Egypt—brought American architect Craig Dykers together with a small Oslo-based office headed by Kjetil Thorsen. The young architects, all of them under age 30, put together a proposal that was so different from the other 500 or so entries that, confident they wouldn’t get selected, they were aiming to get noticed. When their bid—a sloped, circular building that had text carved into the outward-facing granite in 120 languages both ancient and modern—won first place, the loose amalgam of half a dozen or so unseasoned architects became a global office.
“Unusually, we started big.” Craig Dykers says over the phone from Snøhetta’s San Francisco studio. “Most designers start small, working on a project like a house and working up to a museum or library. We started with a library and have now designed a beehive.” Their contracts since then have not flagged in either size or scope. With a project list including the Oslo Opera House, a revamp of Times Square in New York City, an expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Paris headquarters of Le Monde, and the September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion, Snøhetta has become one of the most trusted architecture offices to tackle ambitious public works; a designation that, although prestigious, carries challenges that don’t come with an asymmetrical Malibu beach pad. Although, for the record, they’re open to that as well.
Case in point: the Bibliotheca Alexandrina took 13 years to reach completion, six of which were spent just dealing with the bureaucracy of all the different government and private organizations that had a hand in it. For Dykers, though, this is all part of the fun, and indeed, Snøhetta is uniquely poised to tackle these types of projects. “Our Scandinavian heritage has deep roots in social issues,” Dykers tells me. “Our understanding of society stems from a more generous perspective, related to various forms of social democracy. Capitalism is of course a part of the culture, but it’s often balanced with social equity and politics in mind. In the United States, the commercial culture of daily life sometimes overwhelms the cultural characteristics of the society. That doesn’t suggest in any way that the US doesn’t have a rich and vibrant cultural life, it does, we just see these worlds in slightly different perspectives, having this unusual background as a company.”
The office’s more recent expansion project for the SFMOMA included doubling the original Mario Botta postmodern structure, built to house the Fisher Collection which contains wide swaths of work from Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, Agnes Martin, and Alexander Calder among others. The Snøhetta addition, larger than the original in both height and width, could not be further aesthetically afield from Botta’s masonry building. Like a sleeping Pixar character that might wake at any moment, the façade is bright white, with creases throughout and sporadically distributed windows. Where a lot of architects would have played it safe, Snøhetta made a bold choice to design a structure that is true to the ethos of the office while also being exactly what the client needed.
“We wanted to design a great gallery space and also create a space for the museum that would be very welcoming to the public,” SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra says about deciding on Snøhetta to build the expansion, “We came to the conclusion that it was less important to us to work with an architect who had a lot of experience in designing new museum spaces, and it was actually more important for us to engage an architect who had a real sense for, and a lot of experience with generous public spaces.”
Right after they won the project, the SFMOMA team and Snøhetta traveled to various museums in Europe and the Americas for inspiration. “One of the things we learned about Snøhetta is they are incredibly collaborative,” Benezra says. “I think it’s interesting and indicative of something important that the firm does not bear the name of a principal designer, but bears a shared name which has nothing to do with either of the lead architects. That expresses a point of view and a set of assumptions that they’re collaborative, that they share expertise and share responsibility, and that makes them really great partners for a client.” Aaron Dorf, a director at the NYC office, who worked as a principal on that project, told me that in creating the design the office spent a long time talking before a general concept emerged. “When that concept is strong and clear, boiled down to its essence, it can take a lot of abuse.” Dorf says, alluding to the seemingly endless rounds of revisions that public projects can undergo. “The key through all the twists and turns is to never lose the thread of that original concept, which I think is still very evident when I walk through SFMOMA today.”
Though two of their eight offices are in the US (New York and San Francisco) the majority of Snøhetta’s earliest work after the Alexandria Library, was contracted in Europe. The US market opened slowly for them, starting with a series of temporary installations for the Guggenheim Museum in 2011, and expanding into a university building in Ohio, a library in North Carolina, and the New York headquarters for OkCupid in 2013. A year after that their pavilion for the National September 11 Memorial Museum was finished, and last year their seven-year-long revamp of Times Square in Manhattan concluded.
The awards of the 9/11 Memorial and Times Square contracts show that the skill set Snøhetta developed after the Alexandria Library has made them uniquely poised to take on some of the United States’ most sensitive assignments. “One learns to be empathetic,” Dykers confirms when I bring this up, “and that’s one of the characteristics of architecture that I personally love: meeting people and hearing their stories. As much as I love working with art, architecture can have a broader connection to large and diverse groups in society on a daily basis.” As SFMOMA’s Neal Benezra mentioned, the company culture that Dykers and Thorsen have cultivated is also responsible for the thoughtfulness of their design. By pioneering a practice they call transdisciplinary thinking, the office keeps itself creatively agile by swapping roles during planning and brainstorming sessions. “With transdisciplinary practice, you are encouraged to transfer your thinking across borders,” Dykers tells me, “so you don’t artificially separate yourself in the design process by your education and your background.”
Though in the hands of an Office Space-type company, this kind of role-playing could seem disingenuous, there is an earnestness to the way Dykers talks about it that tells me that Snøhetta attracts the type of employee who believes in the common good. “Everyone says, ‘Well you couldn’t have the “Mona Lisa” if 25 people were painting it,’ and this is true of certain forms of art,” Dykers says, pausing thoughtfully for a moment. “But architecture is not a painting, it’s something very different. A large number of people use works of architecture, and if that’s the case why shouldn’t larger numbers of people be involved in creating it?”