The MuAre exposition consists of a series of prism light boxes, mock-ups, two films about the work of the workshop, and a large touchpad table containing a detailed catalog of Snohetta's projects. However, it is still not complete: in a little more than 20 years of its existence, the bureau has developed more than 800 projects, and it would be extremely difficult to cover them all.
The exhibition was presented to Muscovites by its curator Eva Madshus, head of the architectural department of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, and Jenny Osuldsen, landscape architect, one of the partners of Snohetta. They gave a joint lecture at Moscow Architectural Institute, and Mrs. Osuldsen held a round table with students at the Vkhutemas Gallery. Such an "explanatory" program came in handy: modern Norwegian architecture and the work of Snohetta as its most famous representative, although well known abroad, including in Russia, but has interesting "generic" features, which can be fully understood it is difficult without knowledge of the context.
The main of these features is a tendency towards symbolism, but not in a superficial postmodern, but more in a philosophical version. The main Norwegian architect of the 20th century, the Pritzker Prize winner Sverre Fen, was inclined to such reflections, and Snohetta is in many ways his heir, although the founders of the workshop, Hjetil Thorsen and Craig Dykers, unlike most of their colleagues, did not study with him at the School of Architecture and design in Oslo. However, like him, they operate with the terms "past", "present", "future", "horizon", correlating their projects with these metaphysical concepts.
The library in Alexandria (the official history of the bureau begins with a victory in this international competition in 1989), with its huge thrown back disc of the facade-roof, marks the transition from the surface of the bay to land, merging with this border and emphasizing it. The resemblance to the solar circle is a later layering of meaning, largely brought by the viewer.
The curved line of the wooden wall of the auditorium of the National Opera in Oslo not only separates the hall from the foyer and the square in front of it, but also marks the border of the sea (the theater is built on an artificial island in the Oslofjord and is surrounded on three sides by water) and land, fjord and city. even European and Norwegian culture! And the popular comparison of a white marble building with an iceberg, although quite relevant, is also secondary.
That is why it is so difficult to define the style of work of architects: like Fehn, this is not the usual modernism, it is also not an "architecture of experiment", although some buildings of "Snohetta" remind of it. In other projects, you can see shades of postmodernism (for example, an "ancient" stone facade with letters and hieroglyphs, which the library faces Alexandria) or digital architecture (multifunctional
complex "Gates of Ras al-Khaimah" in the UAE), but in each project - more than the sum of style features.
The center of knowledge and culture of King Abdulaziz in Saudi Arabia is, at first glance, another fantastic project of Western "stars" in the Middle East: after all, even Thorsen himself notes that it is easier to work in the very young cities of the Arabian Peninsula, since there is almost no architectural resistance to everything unusual. traditions. But, nevertheless, the project is based not on a random algorithm, but on the phrase of Italo Calvino that “culture is the keystone of the arch”. And the streamlined volumes of the complex are pebbles folded into an arch like: none of the pebbles can be removed, each is irreplaceable, otherwise the structure will crumble. At the same time, architects, also following the Norwegian tradition, interact with the landscape as with the most important participant in the “architectural process”. The customers did not allow the building to be placed in the middle of the desert, in a direct dialogue between nature and a man-made object, demanding to lay out a garden around, but Snohetta designed for them not lush tropical bushes, but a park made of local flora familiar to the heat.
Landscape architects, like interior designers, have worked in the bureau on an equal footing with "real" architects from the very beginning. Therefore, the workshop's portfolio includes interiors of popular restaurants, landscaping of modest squares and even small courtyards in Oslo: the scale of the order is not important, architecture can positively affect the lives of people at any level. Among the projects of "Snohetta" -
the entrance pavilion of the 9/11 Memorial Museum in the WTC complex and the reconstruction of Times Square in New York, the new building of the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, complementing the famous building of Mario Botta, the next Maggie Cancer Center in Scotland, the subway in Spain, a museum in Mexico, but despite a well-deserved international reputation, most of its buildings are located in Norway. Here, the landscape often becomes the main source of inspiration and the main obstacle resisting human invasion, but the results of such an intense creative process more than justify the effort expended: this is the Peter Dass Museum, cut into the fjord bank so as not to disrupt the appearance of the natural and architectural environment, and a pavilion for observation of the reindeer "Tverfjelhütta", and many other objects.
Landscape and architecture merge in an urban environment. On the sloping roof-facade-square of the opera house in Oslo, there are areas where the city disappears from sight, and a person is left alone with the sky; in addition, there the architects tried to minimize the control over the inhabitants by the state, their subordination to external rules. In their opinion, society is capable of self-regulation, and it would be better for the troublemaker to be stopped by fellow citizens than the police, watching numerous video cameras. Freedom is facilitated by open access at any time of the day or night, the absence of benches and signs. Skateboarders cannot train on the roof, but they still practice there, which the authors of the project look at indulgently. The roof, officially designed as a work of art, does not fall under the law on the accessibility of the environment for people with disabilities: otherwise, we would have to make special stairs everywhere, bright stickers, perhaps even completely close some of its sections or change the project. But architects do not consider such a way out of the situation inhumane: in their opinion, society itself is capable of taking care of all its members, and if, for example, a person who is not easy to move around wants to climb to the very top, other citizens will certainly help him.
Also among the key themes of Snohetta's work are collaboration with artists and the creation of art objects, environmental “sustainability”, the use of new or original application of well-known technologies, which becomes a kind of “legacy” of the implemented projects. The exhibition in MuAre covers only a part of the ideas and images that have already become the bureau's contribution to national and world architecture, but the compact and brightly made exposition serves as a bridge to further acquaintance with Snohetta and Norwegian architecture in general.
