Global architecture firm Snøhetta has had a pretty stellar 12 months, and is set for another landmark moment on Sunday. The firm’s much anticipated extension of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is set for its grand opening, allowing the public their first look inside the huge, glacial addition to Mario Botta’s postmodern original.
The new building, a 10-story tower of rippled white concrete, will constitute a particularly special moment for Snøhetta’s founding partner Craig Dykers. The American has been with the firm since the beginning, and has now seen major commissions come to fruition on both coasts of his home country: The National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City opened in 2014, while the newly expanded SFMOMA is surely the Bay Area’s most significant new cultural building this century.
© Henrik Kam, San Francisco USA
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © Henrik Kam, courtesy of SFMOMA
In advance of the opening, Architizer sat down with Dykers to discuss life in the firm’s New York studio, key projects on the drawing board and some invaluable advice for young architects looking to start a firm of their own.
Paul Keskeys: Let’s start with the studio. What aspects of your New York workspace do you feel help encourage creativity amongst your staff?
Craig Dykers: The beer tap?
[laughs]Yes, that makes a lot of sense!
Our kitchen is the entry to the studio and it’s an open kitchen, so you don’t enter our studio by approaching a secretary or receptionist. I think that breaks down a lot of barriers, not only for visitors, who are often incorporated into the design process, but also for the people that work here. They feel they belong to a kind of living space. It’s not exactly domestic, but it has a sense of domesticity intermingled with a kind of rough, raw, “maker”-type space. A creative space has to have a balance between focus and openness, and I think that the various elements we have allow for that range.
Inside Snøhetta’s New York studio; photograph by Paul Keskeys
I noticed you have a kind of workshop in your studio, a model-making area. How does that space fit into your creative process?
We really enjoy getting physical in our thinking. We sometimes say that if you’re only thinking with your mind, you’re not really thinking. You have to think with your whole body. The model shop allows us to be physical, to interact in a visceral way, with each other and with materials.
That’s very different than suggesting that the model shop is about making things three-dimensional. That’s traditionally why people have model shops: They want to make three-dimensional visions of what they’re designing, in a way that a computer can’t do. While that’s a part of why we have a model shop, it’s not the main reason why we have it. The reason is to get people moving physically and thinking actively.
Inside Snøhetta’s New York studio; photograph by Paul Keskeys
Can you tell me a little bit more about how you work with your clients? What do you present to them in the opening stages of the project?
There are many different types of clients, so we find a range of ways of interacting with them depending on their needs. But I would say, generally speaking, we try to create early workshops that are somewhat fun. Sometimes we play games.
“The ability to relax creates efficiency, and allows you to shed a great deal of nervousness.”
It may seem wasteful — just like the beer tap might seem wasteful to people — but ultimately these kinds of things make you very efficient. The ability to relax in very high-pressure circumstances, which many of these projects are, creates efficiency, and allows you to shed a great deal of nervousness and move straight to the point.
You know, honesty is a very important product of clarity, and clarity of course allows efficiency. It’s hard — modern social conditions aren’t very well-suited to being honest. Sometimes, honesty can be hard or challenging, so making a framework — an environment when we first meet clients where people can openly speak without feeling they’ll be chastised — allows us all to benefit from each other’s perspectives.
Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria, Egypt
Moving on to look at the firm as a whole, Snøhetta has undergone an amazing transformation over the past 25 years. Has success changed the identity or philosophy of the studio at all?
I would say that, even though we have grown, we still operate as though we are [a] small group. We’re very intimate in our connection to projects. Of course, there are logistical challenges when you get larger, different ways of working with management, but basically we’re very much the same company we were when we began.
“Long before the notion of the ‘global village’ was even understood, we were working in such a manner.”
What’s interesting is that we have always been an international company made of differing cultures, all working together. The media often represents us as Norwegian, and we have strong Norwegian roots and Norwegian heritage, but we’ve always been a group of people from different countries. I think long before the notion of the “global village” was even understood, we were inherently working in such a manner. We had people from multiple countries, with different backgrounds, cultures and educations sitting in a studio, trying to understand each other. We still are that way.
As an international studio working all over the world, how do you approach projects in terms of their local history and heritage?
I would remind you of our beginnings, which was an international project in a country far away from where we lived. Our first commission was the Alexandria Library in Egypt. We’re not Egyptian, nor have we ever lived in Egypt. So, I would say that from the very origins of our firm, we needed to understand how to be empathetic, and how to provide fresh perspective to people who would become very accustomed to their cultural surroundings. So, that has always been with us from our beginnings to our current condition.
© Lorne Bridgman
Ryerson University Student Learning Centre, Toronto, Canada
Do you have a project that you’re particularly proud of, or that you feel was a seminal moment for Snøhetta?
This is always a hard question to answer! It’s a bit like being a parent: You always say that your most recent child is your favorite, so the ones that are hot on the press right now are going to be the ones that are currently our “babies.” We recently opened a library and a student center in Toronto, Canada, where we’ve been able to enjoy watching how people use the building. That is something that is very important to us.
“It’s a bit like being a parent: You always say that your most recent child is your favorite.”
Other current projects we have — the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the French Laundry, the museum in Lascaux — those are all wonderful projects, which we’re extremely proud of. I would say that, although they’re going to open very soon and the construction is nearly complete, we don’t fully enjoy our work until after we see how it’s occupied.
As a result, we sometimes do not publicize buildings until after they’ve been occupied, so we can see how people use them rather than getting the photographs taken before the building opens, when everything is spotless. You hit the press the day they cut the ribbon. The most recent finished project here in North America is the Ryerson Student Learning Centre, and the way people are photographing it and posting pictures online from their own perspective is just a joy.
We have a number of other interesting projects: We have been developing a master plan to improve conditions in the Penn Plaza area around Madison Square Garden and Penn Station, which is one of those projects where there’s hell to pay because it’s hard! But you know that [Penn Plaza] is so much in need of attention. There’s great value in it.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; courtesy of MIR and Snøhetta
Do you have any advice that you would give young architects today, who may be thinking about starting their own firm?
Yes — the first thing is you have to go out and make your own world. Often, that means taking risks. You have to have a wide understanding of the world. I always say being an architect is very much like being an author, or perhaps a writer of music. Life is the fuel. A book is useless unless the story is worth reading, and music is not very helpful if it doesn’t engage with its listener.
The only way you can learn those processes is by living things and by opening your mind up to many other things beyond your own discipline. So, a musician who only studies music for music’s sake will probably not be a great composer. A writer who only studies styles of writing will not be a great author. But those that go out and connect with life on many levels are able to fuel their desires and funnel them into a place [that] connects with people, beyond the one who has made the thing itself.
“The lowest thing on my list when I graduated was getting a job!”
I think young people today have become so compartmentalized because the world around them has expanded, so they tend to focus on just the few things that might relate directly to their studies. Architects study other architects, sometimes only specific firms from a similar context, maybe just the architects from the last 10 or 15, 20 years.
I think you really have to open your mind and push; take risks. When I was younger, I would have worked as a cashier in a shop — if it allowed me to make the things that I wanted to do. Or I would take a non-paying job, you know, volunteering my time for something until I could get my own way of working clear. And in fact the lowest thing on my list when I graduated was getting a job. [laughs]
For more on Snøhetta’s amazing ascent over the past 25 years, check out this in-depth feature about the firm’s fascinating history.