STORY / PUBLIC SOURCE RECORD
Bringing ocean space into architecture
- Published 24 March 2023; updated 21 September 2026; estimated reading time 6 minutes. The feature profiles Kjetil Thorsen, founder and head of Snøhetta. It notes the firm’s 1989 win to design Alexandria Library and later projects including Oslo Opera House, the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion and Lascaux IV Caves Museum. Thorsen says society is moving from treating waves, weather and wind as forces to resist toward designing alongside natural systems.
- Snøhetta’s Under restaurant is described as submerged five metres below the sea surface. Its untreated concrete was selected to provide habitat for marine organisms as well as to serve as a building material. Thorsen says the structure gives marine researchers a stable underwater observation point for daily measurements such as light and temperature and for counting organisms such as juvenile lobsters in a fixed volume.
- Thorsen advocates a detailed, publicly accessible map of Norway’s coastline and nearshore zone, covering features roughly 10–15 metres from the beach, such as spawning grounds, seaweed/kelp, stones and reefs. He says coastal conditions can show early signs of ocean change, including acidification, warming, litter and shifts in salinity or oxygen. He also argues that accessible mapping could improve public knowledge and inform decisions about where development is appropriate. He compares the technical challenge with Snøhetta’s scanning of Lascaux cave walls to 3 mm accuracy.
- The feature describes Snøhetta’s participation in Norway’s Powerhouse collaboration, which aims to create buildings producing more energy than they consume over their full lifecycle. Thorsen says this requires tracking the carbon footprint of all construction materials, down to the energy source used to manufacture individual components. He discusses trade-offs between architectural form and maximising solar-panel output, and argues that ecological impact should increasingly shape what society considers beautiful.
- Thorsen presents Norway as a testing ground for sustainable solutions: demonstrate projects at full scale, measure their effects and share lessons internationally. He says Norway cannot supply every global need by volume but can pilot technologies and make research and expertise more widely available. The article closes with his view that further ambitious ecological action and continued experimentation are needed.
- Related project links include Under, Oslo Opera House, Lascaux IV and Powerhouse. Related industry: Architecture and construction. The captured page has no contact block.