How do you get close to a building? How do you get under the skin of a building? To me that is to do with certain types of intimacy and direct relationships.
There is no such thing as architecture for the sake of architecture. There is only architecture for the sake of people. When I got this job and I came here I realized I wanted the nature into the play.
You can't fight this, nature. So I just wanted to be a friend with the surroundings. And then we understood, let's call Snøhetta.
And I was just like, the water is too far away from the audience. Should we just move the audience towards the water? And then they said, we'll solve it.
And then they brought the water to the audience instead. Working in the office environment in Norway, the biggest difference was that everyone's allowed to be themselves. What's unique here is that it very much is a flat structure.
The first time I came into the office of Snøta I thought I'll be an architect. This is where I want to be. It seems like it's a kind of realization of the social democratic idea. Initially, in the mind of Norwegians, Snøretøy is a mountain.
It's really not a design and architectural practice. And this mountain is a sort of gravity point of Norway. So if you put your finger up at where the mountain Snøretøy is located, the whole of Norway would balance in weight.
I don't even know. This is like a story that I've been told. And then I've kind of like made it my own, but that's allowed in Snøhetta, so it's okay. The whole reason for why we're called Snøhetta is this philosophy of that everyone can go to Snøhetta, but no one can take Snøhetta with them. So it's kind of like this same philosophy about like nature of Norway, where it's for everyone.
It's not something that we own. There's someone owning this lake. And also these surroundings.
They're an owner. Private owner. But everybody can walk in these forests. By keeping the nature publicly accessible, you also say that you can own the ground, but it doesn't really only belong to you. And that is beautiful because that's how one should look at Earth and the Earth per se.
This same philosophy is also applied to the way we approach our projects. Like the opera house, the architecture allows everyone to use it. You can sit, lay down, have your food, you can even, you know, people skate on it.
You can walk on it, although it doesn't belong to you legally. So intimacy, in a moment, generates ownership. For instance, now I'm sitting on this chair.
So while I'm sitting on this chair... It's my chair. But once I go away, it's the chair of the Opera House.
The cultural experience used to be only for the elite. But what we did by just being able to use the building, you are straight away more close to what happens on stage and the culture behind it. You become part of the Opera House even though you don't necessarily have visited any performances. And the roof of the Opera House is utilizing this right of roaming you could say. If you want to connect to something you also have to be able to use it.
Like the wild reindeer pavilion, it's part of a series that we have called keyless structures, meaning places without a lock. You can walk in and out, it's open. You don't have to ask anyone, you just go. And that in itself is a virtue of openness and inclusiveness.
That's when things are starting to get equal. And the funny thing is, we wanted maybe people to take out their knives and engrave certain messages in the wood. But they don't.
So the larger public feel that they should be taking care of it. Now, part of the discussions we were having with Opera House, the whiteness of the opera is that it will be sprayed down by graffiti artists. Nothing.
Not one piece. You protect it. Because it's also partially yours. The Norwegian nature is owned by everyone.
Once we come into nature, we get kind of stripped from everything that we are. We become equals. We're not defined by our job, our positions, our cars or our house.
We are just humans.