Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, January 22, 2026 : Snøhetta AS, a Norwegian architectural firm (#2466)

Thursday, January 22, 2026

Artist of the Day, January 22, 2026 : Snøhetta AS, a Norwegian architectural firm (#2466)

Snøhetta AS is a Norwegian architectural firm headquartered in Oslo, Norway.
The company was formed in 1987 by Kjetil Thorsen and a group of young architects. They named it Snøhetta after the tallest mountain in the Dovrefjell National Park. In 1989 they joined forces with New York architect, Craig Dykers, to enter the competition to design a replacement for the Library of Alexandria (the winning design for Bibliotheca Alexandrina wasn't completed until 2001).

Snøhetta has received the World Architecture Award for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Oslo Opera House, and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Since its completion in 2008, the Oslo Opera House has also been awarded the Mies van der Rohe Award, the EDRA (Environmental Design Research Association) Great Places Award, the European Prize for Urban Public Space, In 2010, through Kjetil Trædal Thorsen’s lead, Snøhetta’s works’ coherence with their environment was awarded the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, both from an international point of view, for their large scale projects, and at a local, small projects scale.

Snøhetta is a transdisciplinary, dialogue-driven practice including architecture, landscape architecture, interior architecture, art and product design, often integrating a combination of interests across our projects.

Snøhetta is a place nobody is from, but anyone can experience. Creating places for societies to connect with each other and with the world around them is a primary motivation in their work. Dialogue and diversity empower this approach.

Although these larger projects are often a focus of attention, they continue to work within a range of scales and types of work starting from something as small as a bird nest or beehive. They work with various types of cultural, science and commercial work from smaller scales to as large as urban master planning. They have designed and built tables, chairs, paving and new environmentally sensitive materials for use in construction.

© 2026. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Snøhetta AS or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only