Global architecture firm Snøhetta is on a mission to design not just buildings, but public spaces
How do you tell a building was designed by Snøhetta? Look for the public spaces. Although the global architecture firm has won widespread acclaim since it was founded in Oslo in 1989, it has no signature style.“We don’t have a top-down design directive,” says Robert Greenwood, a Snøhetta partner and the firm’s managing director for Asia. “The design always grows out of a dialogue with the client and the site. That means we get quite a big diversity of projects, and it makes every project unique.”
It’s a philosophy rooted in what The New Yorker magazine called “the psychology of space” in a profile of the firm and its founders, Kjetil Trædal Thorsen and Craig Dykers. “It’s an old slogan, but people always come first,” says Greenwood. “Architecture is always about people.”
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