Oslo, spring. On the edge of the fjord, where a few years earlier there was a container port and an abandoned district, a white building rises from the water like a glacier. It has no façade, it has a roof: a long sloping surface of Carrara marble that climbs from sea level to twenty metres in height, and that one walks on. Families picnic on it, teenagers bring skateboards, tourists look at the fjord from the top. The building is the Oslo Opera House (2008), and it was designed by the studio Snøhetta, which for once states clearly what it wants: that the public climb the opera before entering it.
A studio named after a mountain
Snøhetta is born in Oslo in 1989, founded by a group of architects including the Norwegian Kjetil Trædal Thorsen and the American Craig Dykers, and takes its name from a mountain in the Dovre range, in central Norway, among the highest massifs in the country. It is not by chance: the studio is founded on the idea that architecture, landscape and design are a single trade, and that projects are the product of collective work, not the signature of a single author. In its early years it works in a kind of balance between Scandinavia and abroad, and at its very birth, in 1989, it wins a competition that seems out of scale for a young studio.
The competition is for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, launched by the Egyptian government and UNESCO to rebuild, on the site of the Ptolemaic library, a building that takes up its role. Snøhetta wins with a project of simple form: a disc 160 metres in diameter, tilted toward the sea like a rising sun, with a reading room of roughly 20,000 square metres that descends in terraces over seven levels. The outer wall, in grey Aswan granite, is carved with characters from about 120 alphabets and writing systems: a wall made of letters, not images. The library is completed in 2001 and inaugurated in 2002, after more than ten years.
The opera you can climb
The competition for the Oslo Opera is in 2000. The city chooses an area, Bjørvika, which at the time is a zone of railways and warehouses, and turns it into its new front on the fjord. Snøhetta wins with a building shaped like an iceberg: the façades are glass and aluminium, the roof descends in slabs of white Carrara marble until it touches the water, and the public may walk it from the outside, without a ticket. The roof is a precise invention: an opera house is a building for the few, and this roof makes it a place for everyone. Inside, the main hall, horseshoe-shaped, is lined in oak and has more than 1,300 seats; the foyer is a great glass wall with a curved wooden surface that looks like an upturned boat.
The Opera is inaugurated on April 12, 2008 and receives the European Union's Mies van der Rohe Award in 2009. But its most important success is an everyday one: it has become the place where the people of Oslo go in summer, to sit facing the fjord. A cultural building that works as a square, so much so that Oslo has continued along that road with the new Munch museum and the Deichman library, both in Bjørvika.
Landscape, energy and craft
In the following years Snøhetta widens its field: the entrance pavilion of the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York (2014), the Powerhouse Kjørbo in Sandvika (2014), a retrofit of two 1980s office buildings turned into energy-positive buildings, the extension of SFMOMA in San Francisco (2016), up to Under (2019), a restaurant that is a long concrete block sunk in the sea at Lindesnes, on Norway's southern tip, with a panoramic window below water level. The thread is consistent: a few strong gestures that put the landscape back at the centre.