#6 / Small Talk with Kjetil from Snøhetta

So I'm very happy to welcome Chetil to our studio. I was just remembering that the first ever podcast to record it was with Ellie. So she got the 01 podcast of Slash and it's really, really good to have you. It feels like, I don't know if you know, but the reason why we started doing these podcasts was because the team was always complaining that I get the best part, which is to chat with my friends and they have these conversations and they never listen to it. And they said, can you start recording the conversations with your friends? So welcome, Chetil. It's going to have you here. Thank you. Nice to be here. You know, this is my second year also, and last year I was thinking, is this possible? You know, it's like, I think we had that conversation last night. To me, it's like turning the world upside down. You come here to have the most creative experiences, you know, usually everyone's talking about Europe as being that place or the states, all of a sudden, you managed with Final Draft and Slash to turn that a little bit upside down. It's impressive. Thank you. I think if it's happening, it's happening because at some point we understood that we couldn't do it alone and we went out, literally when I met you, we were going out, handing out invitations to come to Abu Dhabi and do things in Abu Dhabi. And then we found out that that was the missing link is that it didn't make sense to start from scratch. We could start from where others are already. And instead of trying to do our own way, from zero, we could do our own way in a more collaborative spirit. Yeah, I know, because I remember the first time we came to Oslo. So we had to say no to the project, but I was so impressed by the way you presented it. You know, the program was all of a sudden like a box with all kinds of different things and you were handing out an opening and next one, next one, I was like, okay, what is this guy doing? You know, like all my, he really knows how to engage the people around the table for them to probably say yes, to participate in something round. At that time, it was impossible for us, but at that point in time already, in my mind, we connected. We did connect and I remember that we left the, the your studio, we were very welcome. I remember the pastries were very good on the table. And we had, it was my first time in Oslo and we left the studio and I kept thinking, how am I going to reconnect with Chetil after this, because at some point during the conversation, I mentioned that we were on this search for the Emirati contemporary identity. And you said in the 20 minutes, 30 minutes, I don't know, we were meeting, you said that's a subject that really interests me. And I kept traveling with the rest of the team thinking, how can I reconnect it back? And it's funny that, you know, some years later, almost every time we are together, you, we talk about this subject in a very informal way, not very academic, but in a very formal way. And this time, this time you're here, these two days, you, we mentioned it again. And I would like to get from where you, what you told me. And what you told me was that we were talking about Japanese identity and Scandinavian identity and then how can we, you know, bring, bring the Emirati identity to the, to the mix and you said, yeah, but it makes all the sense. Can you remind me? Yeah, I know, I mean, to me it really does make a lot of sense, right, because, you know, in many ways, even if a Japanese culture is old, it's always dealt with the immediacy of availability of things, it's reduced it down to compositions like the furniture, it's reduced it down to compositions of simple elements that actually, through the constellation of how they're brought together, start making meaning. Norway and the Emirates are young countries. We've also only lived from the various person elements and, and possibilities that we have. So we've had to take care of, in a simplistic manner, the things that are around us in order to create our cultures. So maybe the Emirati and the Norwegian culture, from, from perception of what is important, are closer than with Japan, but Japan jumps right in the middle trying to connect these things and that's why I think this triangular kind of position between Japan, Nordics, maybe more also than only Norway and, and the Emirates, is really at hand. You know, the Vikings, they only knew how to build boats, they couldn't even build a house, because when they hadn't made a house, they just turned a boat upside down and they slept under it. So, you know, they didn't know really, and all their houses looked like boats. Everything was about floating on the sea. Here everything has been about moving in the sea of deserts. And, and we, we, we, we mentioned a lot of times the connection of the three points through the scarcity and the, and the need of doing what you can with what you have, and because you don't have a lot, you, you are functional, it's function over, over form. But the other element that I, I find always when I speak with you or when I speak with Scandinavian designers is how then the narrative comes and how then there's a story to support. So it's not just a question of taste, and saying, "Oh, I really like birds, birds would, but it's because there's a logic, a narrative to support that." And, and some things do have many sides. So it's not only based on simplicity, it's almost like a condensation of content into something that is more simplified. It's not, it's like, you know, reducing the source. Has a lot of great ingredients, but the end result is a very strong taste of many ingredients in a much simpler expression. In the Nordics, we have that kind of exposed through the way we live with nature. So nature is the most demanding kind of element in our lives. And I heard yesterday also Jean-Proveil mentioned, near Jean-Proveil said, you know, for instance, architecture has nothing to resist, but nature. So you're bringing this counterpoints of culture and nature somehow together in a way of trying to create better lives for yourself, you know, the next harvest. You have to plan forward because the winter is long and cold, so you have to build a house where you have the potatoes so you can still eat them during the whole winter. So the planning aspect in extreme climates is much higher than when you can sit by the tree and pick the fruits, you know, and eat them the same time, or the same day. Yeah. I come from Portugal and that got us to be quite lazy, maybe, we don't need to make a big effort to get access to things and that we look at the south of Europe and the north of Europe. There's great things in the south of Europe, but obviously the scarcity again of the extreme of the north led to, in our opinion, more developed and combined with the fact that you have to use everything, right? So you have to plan, you have to think forward, otherwise you die and the same does the extreme climate of the desert have. And also utilizing everything out of the things that you're catching, like the Sami I was talking about yesterday have this description of dojdi, taking the reindeer and using every pack of the reindeer, I mean everything. The skin, the hairs, the horns, the guts, the stomach, everything, meat obviously. So scarcity makes you invent how to use everything from what you have. You're resourceful, very resourceful. So obviously we know Snowhead for many years, following your practice for many years, we never dreamt that one day we would be sitting and having this conversation. And one of the things that I think, in my opinion, in my humble opinion, differentiates you from a lot of other practices is the depth of your team when we speak with them and your self. It's never about the shape of the building, it's always about what it's under that it can't be seen. Is that the characteristic of the company or is that also characteristic of the identity of the Norwegians? How did that happen? It's you. It's a little hard to pinpoint exactly how it comes, but I would have to say having grown up in a social democratic country, where the policies after the war, second world war, were of course all about community thinking. It was all about creating a political system where everyone contributed in the face of the other to help the collective country to come out of a crisis. Now, at a certain point, the reconstruction after the war ended, but a lot of the mentality of this collectiveness of the country was maintained. And the deep end of collectiveness is not looking at exactly the formation of that crowd or that group, but it's what every singular contributes to the plural. It's how the individual contributes to the collective. And I think we embedded that very early as a way forward for also thinking about how to create our physical surroundings, how to make people think they own something, a collective ownership idea. And I think also we managed maybe to build that upon some of that very early social democratic thinking, which then expanded into teaching systems and medical systems and whatever you have. We are kind of stamped in our forehead, this bringing up from early age. And I think it's influenced also our collective thinking as a way of looking at not only the object, but what does it do to people. We keep saying there is no architecture without people. It's being defined by the people moving into whatever house you've designed. When it stands alone empty, it's not yet architecture. And that not many would say that, because a lot of architects describe architecture for the sake of architecture per se alone, which is more like an artistic way of looking at it. But monuments, yes, monuments you can create for themselves. They don't need the same interaction with the public. But architecture is per se the activity happening in the house. It's not the object. But then I understand that when you start your practice and you have that vision, but then you manage to continue that to the hundreds of people that work with you, because every single one of your team members that we meet with, they maintain that obsession maybe with telling the story. And you're guaranteeing that it's their substance to support the design. I truly hope so. If you find someone who doesn't tell me, you know, it's like I really hope that because you're building a deep end culture, so collaborative work is about how you sort of bring people not necessarily online to become singular and having the same mindset of everything. But it's a way of, you know, finding a core somewhere that you find worth fighting for throughout your whole life and for the next generation also. And architecture's tool, design is a tool to reach the goals that are beyond the design and the architecture itself. Is that why it's no head, it's cause no head, and not jet, you know, architects? Yes. Yes. When you had to make that decision in the late 80s, what led you to not call it your name and like everybody else did, why is it a collective and why is so important? We were a little bit fed up by some architects calling their practices their name and never letting anyone sort of shine, if you wish. Or letting anyone say, this is too complex for one mind to have been done. So we saw a lot of singular names in architectural practices where the master architect always had an overshadowed everything else. But we knew that that wasn't true because it was a complex situation of a lot of people that actually contributed to realizing this so-called mastermind's idea. It's a little like filmmaking, it's okay to have a director. But you should list all the names. The actors, the people working with the light, you know, should all be part of that communal. And we were a little frustrated by the fact that every time you say it, you went to an exhibition and only a single name appeared at that exhibition. And as if this person had done it all and we knew it wasn't the truth. So we wanted to combine landscape architecture and architecture at the same time because we felt landscape architecture had been left for too long as a way of, you know, if any money was left after the construction was finished, you could plant a couple of trees and they called it landscape architecture. So we wanted to combine it in, so also the economies of landscape architecture, the immediate surroundings and surroundings of the building were included into the project. But that was early, nobody else did that, today it's much more common this cross. But you didn't stop there because out of the big architecture firms in the world, you are the, I don't remember any other, for example, that has graphic design as a product. And you do, and it quite successfully through your team, that multidisciplinary was always part of the mindset or was something that you felt that it was a need to deliver division of the project. No, no, I mean, we started off with trying to explain this holistic approach by looking at what parts of the orange was missing. So you know, we were putting the orange together and not subdividing it into different parts. So we had, we started off with half an orange, we had to add another quarter and another quarter. So we were full orange, we said, okay, now fine, we have the creative disciplines that we believe we need in order for us to approach something holistically. And we see the crossover really working, different education, different backgrounds, different parts of the world, I think now we're close to 50 nationalities spread around. I think it's, it's this, okay, you can climb the mountain, but you can definitely climb it from different sites. Another component and as to do with with the subject of this three days here in Abu Dhabi of the craftsmanship, I'll never forget that the first time I visited your studio and the second time I visited the studio. One of the places that everybody feels more proud to show is the workshop in the back. It's like it, I went there with different people, but every single one that takes me there is like almost like, look at these, we're so happy to bring you to the back to the workshop. Yesterday, one of the members of the team was mentioning about the need to touch the need of getting out of the desk and is also that a fundamental part of the identity of the company. Absolutely, but I'm envious of you and your workshop, because initially we want a 50% workshop oriented work in the same space and 50% drawing and conversations. So initially we wanted and maybe now after having conversations we should go back and sort of expand on the workshop. It still is not utilized to its full extent the way I would have liked to see it happen, but at the same time it's always been there, but it's been there more like, okay, I own a boat, not me, but someone coming in and repairing the boat in the workshop or creating this home furniture for himself or doing models or using the robot the CNC machine or using 3D prints or the laser culture or whatever, but that is, we define the relationship between the analog and the digital in four ways. The analog is the things you only do with your hands, which is important. You can do that in the workshop. You have the analog digital is what you make with your hands and then you turn it into a computer, scanning and so forth. Then you have the digital analog is what you create in the computer, then comes out at the other side through a CNC machine, a 3D print or whatever it might be, but it comes tangible. And last one is digital, digital, whatever stays in the computer, it never comes out other than just a file or a picture. So you can say the computer is physical in a sense or the space you're sitting in when you're operating the computer is analog, but the file is not analog. So this movement between these positions, these four positions is really important to us. I think we need to train people to do the best on the technical side and the best on the analog side, otherwise it cannot melt together. We will not survive if we don't develop both at the same time. Just to let you know, we learned very fast. So when I visited Snowhead at the first time, our workshop was smaller than years, but then we saw, honestly, I remember sending pictures to a mart of your workshop and saying, we need, we need, what you are saying now, we need to increase. I said exactly the same thing to Martin said, we need to increase, because what I saw in Norway is we need to put this in our studio and it has been extremely impactful, not only in design, but one of the things that I'm completely obsessed about is presentations. I think the famous box that I brought to Oslo. film as a designer that a lot of great ideas die because they are not well presented. And I became almost obsessed with that because I need to tell this I sometimes I only have 15 minutes to present sometimes I have two hours. But I with all the restrictions that I have I need to make sure that the I know the priority I know what is the most important part of the story I need and and seeing what we do you do with your projects at the entrance of your studio you have a mini display of a lot of the things you you use to present projects and that also was very inspiring for us. No I this immediacy or this intimacy we've been talking about so much also right it's so hard to be in a situation if if it's not available to you. It has to somehow represent itself as something that you can take in this sensitization that we've talked about before you know how do you sensitize the mind to be open enough to take things in it has to do with something immediate whether it's the screen whether it's a table the chair whether it's a building doesn't really matter you have to somehow have a relationship to it a bodily relationship otherwise you can't take it in you can't open your mind. And and the four elements you mentioned with digital and and analog you know I'm still learning out what people react in what moment and how they react to what and and so on because sometimes yesterday were two days ago we're doing a presentation and there was a super simple A4 architectural model with a little bit of sand and three pieces of wood and the reaction that that I had from the person we were presenting was much bigger and better than if I had the 3D goggles with you know and and that moment of looking to a table to a little model and the perception of it was definitely not a detail because a 3D render would have much more detail but there is something that connects people with the object and this links back to the craftsmanship and and craftsmanship what I've been trying to tell to my team is that being a good craftsman it's you don't need to be a carpenter to be a good craftsman you know you can be a good craftsman for example the beautiful way you serve lunch in your studio that's craftsmanship you know the way it prepares how how is that part of the identity in one point but also at the same time maintained over decades where things change I think maintenance is repetition to a large extent you have to I'm unfortunately a person that sometimes say I've said these ones so you know is relevant forever you have to go back and repeat certain things that are of value because the system does not adapt in itself system forgets or it has other priorities or it moves in different directions so there is a need there needs to be a certain level of repetition you can do that in writing you can do it with books and preparing books that you actually work on you can do that through seminars you can do the communal kind of events like we're doing with the climb up to the mountain there are many ways of maintaining this kind of attitude that we want the office to have but there will always be years where it's sort of oh you feel now it's declining a little bit it's coming down a little bit we have to be careful and then you have to read yes you have to refuel somehow and and that is of course very stressful because you have to prepare also for me I have to prepare next generation to do the same at a certain point I'm I'm not here which is quite obvious but but you know the the situation is we want this legacy to carry on anyway that then also maybe finds different tools like establishing more autonomous studios around the world it's part of that so how do they grow because we don't have all the design coming back to the home office in Oslo no they do the design in these different places quite autonomous and then we have the exchange and we have people traveling we have online communication we have crossovers of people who work here and there so I think to some extent we're managing to keep it but it's hard work you know it's not something you can leave to coincidence you have to nourish it the idea of the repetition is is is something that I've been thinking and thinking more about we have a master carpenter in in our team that that I really like and we learn a lot with with each other and I remember the first time I met him that he told me because he did the career from from nothing yeah from teenager although and he was telling me that he took him I don't know six years until he was allowed to grab a hammer because for all those years the only thing he was allowed was to clean the floor but it was a carpenter but the master carpenter didn't think he was ready to to touch anything and he needed to repeatedly and clean it well and make sure that you will anticipate the needs of the master carpenter until and that patience of repeating repeating now you are ready to go to the next stage which you can put some nails you know and then you start sending and then I understand that and I don't want to unite I know I sometimes sound a little bit old but but there's I do understand that now things are faster because you learn we have access to information in a different way you process faster there's many things but repetition is still important still important but but skill also increases with responsibility and in order to give responsibility you need to establish trust so anyway sometimes we throw people into deep water and see how they react you know maybe they have an overload of responsibility at two early in age so what happens then is they come back and hopefully we've established safety net for them to fall into so they know they they can fall but they don't fall very far and I think for us to establish these kind of social impactful situations where on one hand you create trust and responsibility that also allows people to flourish at an age where you would maybe not expect and I know that for myself because we were only 30 years old when we won the Library of Alexandria and we have trusted by the Ministry of Higher Education of Egypt to actually do this so you know it is you have to be careful not to hold people back correct but you also have to be careful to build safety net that will catch them if they fall to be at the arms length yes so that you can grab it if needs you mentioned something about the identity of the studios and how snow it is growing and then you want these studios to at some level be independent and and do what they have to do one of the things that I find the interesting and it's we are kind of trying to learn about because of projects that we do is this idea that you work around the world snowhead the works around the world and I don't know I hope this is a compliment there's not a snowhead style no although not a style could also be seen as a style correct I mean correct but no and we try not to define design typologies that are being repeated wherever you are in the world so I think people have even accused us for being to some extent to contextually correct because that might mean you're too politically correct but who cares I don't correct I really don't care about that completely agree with it but but that's been a criticism and we've read it by high and critics in different newspapers and magazines but but for me this makes a lot of sense you know because you have your two legs your two feet out the place where you're actually operating you're in contact with it and then you need the input from the outside in order to shake it up but you need both you cannot like Martin was talking about today becoming prepared and unprepared it is it is a way forward I was about to to continue on the thing of the different national days and I bring it up but since you brought Martin yesterday you mentioned a subject that I'm really really interest about which is intuition and and you know there's an obsession with knowledge and you have we have access almost to infinite knowledge way more knowledge than we can process even knowing that it's 11 million bits or something that we can process per second I think I'm a little bit below 11 million bits per second but no I don't think so but but how what is the role so you have all these countries for example opera house in Oslo opera housing in Shanghai there's there's nothing to do with with each other Completely different programs, completely different scales, continents. The subject before going back to intuition that I was trying to continue is what is the layer? We have been talking about national identity and you work in China and you work in Oslo. How much is national identity? How much is client identity? How much is when you mix the soup and you know the plate comes out? How much research, how much your will, how much? Because that one, maybe because you presented so well several times, I look at it as like of course this is in China. Yes. I think there is a deep research but we also want to create beautiful things. It's not like there is a detachment from the content and the deep understanding in relationship to beauty and aesthetics, they belong together, there is an inherent kind of connection. At the same time we are trying to say maybe there are also inherent human qualities that go beyond local traditions like this iceberg, UT Hall 1960 saying you know 10% of the iceberg is visible language, cultural expression, 90% is invisible, that's the German genome. It's how we evolved as people around the world. So there are objective elements that connect people worldwide and then there are special elements of culture, visible language that also connect us but have a slight difference. So I'm kind of opposed to when we have new countrymen coming to Norway for instance. The policy is to first look at the differences in order to integrate so to speak the new countrymen coming from outside of Norway and to Norway. My point would be we should first look for the similarity in order to understand the differences. That's where we're coming from. When we design something that looks like China but has a quality of opera house in China, then we still believe that walking on the roof is a human condition rather than a Chinese or Norwegian condition because everyone walks on the earth. So in a way it's some generic elements and some specific elements and of course we have worked with theory, an architectural theory for many many years, you know oblique architecture, French development in the 60s, gravity works differently towards your body prepositions in nature in relationship to where is your body located in relationship to an object in relationship to nature, how to transform this notion of emotional connection to something if you can't touch it, if you can only look at it from two kilometers away. And these are the kind of more generic human qualities that we're looking for. And I think it actually does work. We're doing the same with the Busan, so now we're testing Korea, China, Oslo and the Roosevelt Library. All of these you can walk over, even the Lasko. So it's this kind of, you can walk on, over, under, in between and all these prepositional relationships that you have to your surroundings, all of a sudden define a little bit how your body is located, where you are. I was, I think I already mentioned to you. I was so surprised when I visited the library in Beijing. It was Sunday, I think. And I chose Sunday because I thought, well, nobody goes to a library on Sunday. So it's going to be great for me to see it. And I think it was busier than I'm all, it was packed. And it was not packed by, you know, like just people walking around, people were reading, they were studying the desks on those steps down, they were completely full. There was not one desk and it's not like 20 desks, it's a lot of desks. There was, because the project is recent, and there was an adoption, and there was an adoption that was emitted. It didn't feel like a new building. It felt like those people owned that place for decades, the way it was used. People going all directions, you know, it, but it has to do with that, with that understanding of for who you are designing and how people are going to use that space. Marke said, you know, you're basically just nudging a lot of things that you're using and architecture to become what that place and what the public actually wants. So you're sort of pushing and nudging things that are implicit already in some sort of necessity. And when that necessity is manifested through an object, for instance, then it will fit immediately with its users, with the city, with the landscape, and to hit this aha moment also in design is all about sensitizing again for the designers and for the creatives that you allow seemingly unrelated issues, connect in your brain. So you could say in Bergen, shops for flowers and shops for fish. When you combine fish shops with flower shops, you have a different explanation of what that shop is. So seemingly unrelated things in life being connected and then you open a new door into possible designs, the landscape in Bergen is not necessarily a library typology. It may be more like a landscape typology, but people in here, they use it in a way as if it was a library, but they perceive it also partially as a landscape. That idea of the work that you have been doing around the world brings me to Abu Dhabi and to the UAE. You start coming here way before I start coming here. You have seen a very young junior country decades ago when you start coming. And now you have been coming and we have been fortunate to host you here in Abu Dhabi very often in your team. And now mixing that with the search for contemporary identity, I started using a lot of codification. I'm starting to use less codification because it feels like the more we try to codify the worst, it will get. What is Abu Dhabi? How do you see us coming from Abu Dhabi? The first place I came to was Dubai. At that time, I think it was only the Mariette hotel by the beach. No other hotels at all. It was the first time we were invited to look at a cultural building in Dubai. It was a library and we started using gravity as a way of representing something. Of course, we didn't win that competition. And since then, I've seen it grown, especially Dubai, in a way that I didn't quite like. I have to be completely honest about this because it was a random kind of urbanized collection of individuals that did not talk together or did not have relationship to culture, did not understand the desert, did not understand the nature or say it felt like a direct transition from all the mistakes that other cities in the world had been doing straight into Dubai. Maybe a little more expensive, maybe a little bit more glossy. And then we were invited here in Abu Dhabi to make a design for the Sheikh Seed Knowledge Centre, which was a competition we won but was never built, where we for the first time looked at the biggest photovoltaics solar roof in the world, it was like 400,000 square meters photovoltaics. It would have supplied the whole city of Abu Dhabi at that point in time with electricity. And it was a little like the Louvre. It was a big roof with a village under the terminology that it takes a village to raise a child. Basically, we know that proverb and it's way things work. And then it went on with many, many different competitions that we've done. And slowly, slowly, we've seen the new generation in the Emirates take over. Even after we did the development in Ras al-Qaimah for that big gateway of building, we've seen a slow take over of a new generation. More thorough, more authentic, more understanding, deeper knowledge, and especially in Abu Dhabi, it feels now that you're trying very hard and that's why I said, you know, coming here is like upside down, you come here to talk about quality, which was normally. left of for the Europeans or the Americans talk about it now we talk about it here in a much more refined way than in Europe or in the States. So in a way there is a change in how you've started to look at your surroundings. I think that base has always been stronger in Abu Dhabi then for instance Dubai or maybe Shajja has had a bit of that but now it feels like it's getting real. Everything we're getting invited to know has this has this extreme urge to become totally authentic. No artificial doda, no sort of attempting to tweak some sort of other parts of the world into the Abu Dhabi setting simply by making a more glossy or more shiny. And do you feel that there's an identity being created and I'm talking on design on architecture. No I'm not sure if whether yet or you know even in all I are we ever getting there completely but there are lots of great examples where you're trying to deep dive into at least the the issues at hand. You're debating them you're discussing them you're looking at them you're weighing them out and I think that that is a massive change that has come with this generation. It has been I tell to my team that it's probably the project of my lifetime I feel very honored to be in this place at this moment because it feels like if we strip the the form if we strip the the look and we we bring the knowledge that we have been collecting over the years in our careers and then we come here with the right mindset. We are facing a unique moment where we can contribute to something that probably and if it's well done it will last and it will help other people doing it doing it better. We can't forget Norway is very young but it's twice the age of the UE more or less. It depends on what year you choose 1814 or 1910. 1910 is when we got rid or when the Danes got rid of us if you wish. So in a way we have 1814 when the Constitution was written and then the Swedes and the Danes were both sort of our kings and queens. We are we can't wait to work more with you and your team and it has been really beautiful and organic relationship that has been I think very fruitful for for all of us and thank you so much for coming and bringing your family and your work family and and allowing us to share time with with all of you and experiences and laughs and knowledge and fruit it has been in food a good food very good it has been a pleasure thank you so much Hattil. Thank you the honor and the pleasure is really on our side thank you thank you.