Jenny B. Osuldsen: About making everyday magic happen

New Visions -seminaari Logomossa 11.10.2018

• New Visions oli Historian museo Turkuun -hankkeen järjestämä kansainvälinen seminaari, jossa käsiteltiin tulevaisuuden museoita kaupunkisuunnittelun, arkkitehtuurin ja sisältöjen esittämisen näkökulmista. Julkaisemme videotallenteet puheenvuoroista YouTubessa ja blogissamme. Videotallenteet eivät ole tekstitettyjä, mutta blogin yhteydestä löytyy puheenvuorot litteroituina.

Thank you. This is Snøhetta, the mountain, 2286 meter tall. And I'm sure you're wondering why an architect and design studio is named after a mountain. And it's a really stupid story. The first office we had downtown Oslo was on a loft and at the bottom, at street level is a very, very, very brown bar named Dovrehallen, the Hall of Dovre. Dovre is the mountain area, on the top of that mountain area is Snøhetta. So, we were on the top of the bar called Dovre, so that's why we're called Snøhetta. We named after a mountain and a brown bar. I'm going to talk about Snøhetta culture, the way we work and the culture of Snøhetta project. And it's really interesting, when Mikko said about the museums because what is a museum and we know that it will be a lot in transformation because the audience demand different things and we all are audience. So, what is the word museum? Last year and what is culture and what is actually the definition of the two of them? I will show you a lot of different project and we'll go superfast. There will be some stories and it's a lot about the concept way we think of.

Okay, so first about Snøhetta. We have offices around the world and we have projects all around the world. As you can see, there is no orange dot in Finland, so we have still not built anything in Finland, so it would be fantastic to get a commission and maybe a dot in Turku, that would be fantastic. We have two main offices, in Oslo and in New York. As you can see from Google Earth, we love Google Earth, the landscape shape is almost the same and the scale is the same, so that's how we find our new placement for new offices. We are 120 people in the Oslo office and 60. It consist of architect, landscape architect, interior architect, graphic designers, and product design and also two artists. And every year we try to climb our holy mountain Snøhetta and we also have the project, the wild reindeer centre there, and last weekend in August we managed to fit 150 people inside, it was really crammed, but it's much better to just get everybody loose and just try to get it out of the box. To try to think differently and always try to work together. Our office space in Oslo is one open space, 1600 square meters and it really reflects the way we work, because we really believe in teamwork, we think that it's super important. So, it's really the team that decides and this is my colleague Rob, who made the sketches one day in the office. And you maybe think this is kindergarten with the yellow and the blue and the red team, but it's really- so, we sit everybody together, so even the administration people sit in between everybody. So, it's not like that one team sits together. It's all about sharing the ideas. And then it's also about sharing what thoughts you have during the day and of course in this drawing what of course lacks, is the coffee machine, because that's the most important place, everybody meet there and then you start talking. It's all about the heads, so we said to be singular and the plural is really important, it's the heads that counts and also how you contribute, how to share your ideas.

Then we came up with this word 'transposition' and that's something about sharing roles and take another role that you're not used to have and that all start with a research project that was about 10 years ago. There were social anthropologists that made a research about how idea work. And they were inviting different kinds of professions and you could say that we as an architect studio we're sort of the only creative profession, because it was Statoil, our big oil company, there was a lawyer firm, there was a bank and there was a magazine. We have all these different kinds of professions that worked, and they were like a fly on the wall for over a year to look how all the different firms were working with ideas. What they found was that these different professions all had together ten drivers how to work with ideas. They defined them, and one of them is like prototyping which is well known in architecture: you make a model and you prototype it and you test it over and over again. My favourite, of course, is liberating laughter, you need to have fun when you're working, and it gets other kind of both ideas and talks when you have fun together. I think also to generate resistance is really important; don't be afraid that you're not agreeing all the time. That actually can lead to a totally different place and then you have to be bolder or more typically to actually have a discussion. I don't think you always have to agree to get a good project. But resistance has to be in a way that comes up with something that is positive, that you can share your ideas. And then punk production is to be risk-taking. As architects we also really, really need clients that are risk-taking. You don't really know what you get in the other end, you can't have control of all the phases, but you sometimes have to go with the flow. So, I think these drivers were super interesting for us. And out of that we started to create a way to work a little bit different with the clients, to start from day one to have the creative phase from day one; to invite everybody in. We have a method that we have used, pictograms, which just are photos, images, to talk about what should represent this project and what should not represent it, to try to find the negative and the positive side of it and then invite them, everybody to make a conceptual model. This is all about ownership and it's all about to be generous. We think that is super, super important, to be generous with all the people adding into, then you get more of the sum.

It all started with the library in Alexandria that was 1989, it was a UNESCO open competition, and I think it was 523 entries. A very, very young office from Oslo, two were just past 30, so they were really young people. From day one we really started to work with built environment, meet the landscape, the site, the context and about being conceptual. So, this is the Bay of Alexandria, the red dot show where we think that actually the library were. It's almost like a circular bay and we worked with the circle and the goddess Osiris, who was also circular and in 1989 the microchip was also circular. That was important for us, to start with a concept. It used to be the seventh largest library in the world, it's probably not that anymore, and it sits along the main street. With this circle, if you think of a disk and you look out on the ocean, you have the ocean is always in your horizon, it's your eye height, whatever height you are, it's in your eye height. If you have a disk and you put it on that one line which is the ocean and then you tilt it and then you find one point that actually is present, today, that's where you enter. And you take away the other lines and you got past and the future. The past had an amazing history of the Library of Alexandria and the history should go a long time into the future. So, this then sits on the bay, it has its circular shape that goes- dips into, also into a pool and it has a very high-tech roof and a very low-tech wall that surrounds it and it's one big, open space in seven levels that is the library. We worked from day one, in the competition, we worked with an artist and a historian, and we were researching all the letters and all the symbols of languages in the world and we start to do that carving in the stone. The interesting thing was that they had forgotten how they carve in stone in Egypt, they forgot that a 1000 years ago, so we had to take them to Norway to teach them how to carve in stone again. This is one of the artists that worked on the Norwegian project and we made them come to Norway, the Egyptians, to then teach them to carve in stone again. This stone with all this carving inside is a lot about the identity of the building and you see on the right side is one person, so one stone is one-by-one and one-by-two meters, so they're huge. And also, in this site, in the context, it should be part of the history and the library, because a lot of people in Egypt said, "why should we spend so much money on a library", they don't have so many people that can read or write. But then to open it up for everybody, so there's no fencing, that I also wanted, to be generous, to say that this is a place, the plaza is open 24/7. This is more like a landscraper than a skyscraper. And in the Arabic Spring, it was really touching when we got photos from the library said that the students, because that's the university next to the site, they were standing hand-in-hand fencing the site, so nobody should ruin it. And then you feel that it has real ownership where it's placed, and you feel you managed to push the world with architecture a little bit.

I really think that site matters and that's something we work a lot with. If you go to northern part of Norway, this is between Trondheim and Bodø, a fantastic, beautiful mountain area called The Seven Sisters. There was a bishop that lived there, Petter Dass, he lived from 1647 to 1707, so in 2007 they said they wanted a new museum for him. He was an important bishop and he talked to the Swedes and the Finns and the Danes, and actually was in a big conversation with everybody. This was in the Norwegian baroque, late, but still. The client said they wanted a small museum for Petter Dass and they had been fighting for a site for 20 years. They had been fighting with the neighbours, there were two farmers. As you can see, the site, the original site was here, we made two sketch designs and we were not happy, because we thought it was not the right space. We looked into the landscape to find something that was more suitable for it. Because we had this magnificent landscape, the natural landscape and then we had the cultural landscape with the old farm and the church and then we found this little dip in the landscape over here, and we said that this is the place. The front of the building should not be larger than the small farmhouses that was next to it. The church could come before you can see the building. We said that we could actually cut in the landscape, make a very precise cut and redefine it with a new building. In this section it's long and you can go through and see through, and I mean this is about the baroque, so it's heaven and hell and very dramatic. And this is northern part of Norway and they're very dramatic. We did the cut in the mountain, it's gneiss, it's a very hard stone and then started to build it and now have the view through. Then, of course, when you do the cut, things happen and suddenly the stone get this beautiful little dip that then start to grow moss which we could never plan for. In the situation together with the church and when it's raining, it's hardly that you can see it, it's like what is building and what is nature? And what is mirroring what? And what is important? It also reflects back on what a museum can be. Then it's leading, it's very clear where to go, you can go through on one side and you can go inside, and you have a fantastic view of the landscape. When you have the northern light, it's even more beautiful and it sits together with the other smaller buildings and the landscape is much more important. And then there is one stair on one side, if that leads to heaven or hell, you have to go there to experience it.

Going back to a city. A city is really for people, I would say that 98 per cent of the projects we do are for humans. I mean, that's just the way it is. We make project for ourselves, but we have to take care of more than just that. So, when in 2000, the library in Alexandria was still not open and we didn't have any work. Then came up a competition, national open competition for the new opera and ballet house in Oslo, in 2000, and we really wanted to enter. The Norwegians had never had an opera house, the old from 1958 was a theatre and there was a big controversy in Norway whether to spend so much money on culture, on opera, a dying culture that nobody cares about. We have so much oil money and are still not really interested in culture which is terrible. It's really, really, really not good. The politicians had been discussing for at least 20 years where the site should be. In the end, they decided that it should be here. As you can see, the road, it's hard to access to the water, a big train station. The good thing was as said, okay, we make the opera house first, we do the cultural building first and then it sets a standard for a transformation of the whole area. That was super clever, really, really important. We were lucky to win the competition and also what was pretty good for us is that here is our office and there is the building site, which almost never happen, so we could really take part of the construction site and follow it totally from A to Z what we always really want to do. What is then the concept here? You have the city grid, Oslo, 650 000 people, it's not big, but it's very green and you have the green with the hills and then you have the blue with water. So, we think it was super important that we should reconnect the city to the green and the city to the water. This should be sloping into water to really take into the nature, the natural elements and this stage tower, that should rise above it. The concept is about the curved wall that is between the water and the culture inside. In the back, we have the factory, 600 people working there, it's on land. And then we have one carpet that puts it all into one element. Even in the competition we said that we know there's so many Norwegians that don't want this building. We say that there's no program for a public space, so we said that okay, we turn the fifth façade, the roof, to a public plaza. If you don't want to go into the opera, you should be able to walk on top of the opera. So, then it should open up to the water and you can do a little sight to the left and go inside the building. It was a pretty tough construction site, because it's below water, but we were lucky to not find too many things. It opened half a year early and it was on budget which was super important for this culture building.

In the start, we talked about that we want a white building, a very, very white building and we were researching for more years to find the right material, it was a big discussion if it should have been only pure Norwegian stone, but with the researcher we had to find the perfect stone that actually could last over time. It's a harsh environment with the salt and a lot of traffic and, in the end, the winner was the Carrara marble, amazingly enough, how opera can it get. And then to have this sloping area on the roof that is a landscape that also then goes into this white space that is open for everybody without any program and it's open 24/7 to walk on it. Also, in the regulation, we shouldn't do anything with the streetscape, because that's another project. We just had to link it with a bridge and then we had our sloping areas. We worked- one architect, one landscape architect and three artists to make it and it has all these 33 000 individual stones in this big puzzle. And then it has all these sloping areas, because of course we have a lot of program underneath, so they had to slope pretty steep and then of course it was a discussion about accessibility. Very nice, gentle slope into the building, but then we said that okay, if we isolate all the kinks that is doing a height difference and we said that this actually is art. So, here, this is art, this is public plaza or this one stone. This is art, this public plaza. Because you don't mark art with a contrast colour or a yellow tape on top of it, so we could keep it all white and we got away with it. We also thought that the threshold to get indoors should be as little as possible, you should always just slide in, so the glass façade. People should be able to always see what's going on inside and people started to get really curious what was going on. And then really have a lot of people and there's a lot of outdoor concerts. The most crazy one was the one when Justin Bieber were there, with 10 000 screaming teenager girls and 50 men. Obviously, this is not from that concert. And then, of course, the winter situation, how do you react to that and how can you use the place year-round and throughout the day. Even real swans going into the opera to go to the ballet and then, of course, there is a program that it has, I think for 10 years now it's been open, 20 million have been walking on the opera, six million has been going to a show which is extremely much more than they ever had before.

There's always a notion about old and new, because we say now that we should not tear down things we have done before, we should reuse it and we know there will be a lot of extension. One of those project was in San Francisco, SFMOMA, the extension. Here you can see the Mario Botta building from -95 and then is the Telephone Building which is a listed building, very important for San Francisco skyline. And then the existing building was 22 500 square meters and extension should be 16 000. I mean, the site is so narrow, so we knew that we had to go up to make a tall building. The site there is kind of interesting. Actually, the site is this thing here, very, very tiny. This is the existing and then you have the Telephone Building behind. So, we're starting to analyse the city grid with the streets and the avenues and then we have back alleys which is very common and used for other things, really back of house stuff in San Francisco. We thought that instead of just thinking of the one main entrance that should be kept from the Botta building, we need to look into that there were more entrances. It should be more porous, like a museum should be super porous, we should have people come in and out from all areas and also the feeling of the concept of it. Since we had to go up in the height, it was really important to look into the section to see which all levels you can actually enter and how you can enter the new and the old building together. So, from the construction site, it started to get taller and taller, and then how to then activate this between-space that almost didn't exist, so we had to shrink the building to say that yes, you can enter from more sides instead of to fill out the whole site. So, just for the green wall that is there, that is now getting like a very, very big carpet, is irrigated from the ventilation water. And it's just local plants and we get a totally different way to then have exhibitions outdoors and indoors together. That's very tiny and it's even, it's very little space, you can still enter, and you have this new space that weaves the city together. And, of course, there are more white box spaces internally that also are pretty flexible and can exhibit the exhibitions. Then, since there are so many floors, it's important that you can orientate yourself, so you know where you are, and you can find your way. Also, use most of the window openings as seating. So this was the building then, this was the rendering, and this is how it's finished and then in the city grid, the Telephone Building is there still, so we're talking about the middle ground. We have the foreground, usually we don't say that the middle ground is that important, but for this project it was super important for us.

Going to the other side of the American continent, we go to Toronto, the Ryerson University. The Ryerson University at the lower end of the Yonge Street, it's sort of the longest street in North America. Ryerson University was listed pretty low, it was not the most popular university. They have a library and they say they want to have a new library or extension to the library. We work, then they said it's going to be something totally new and it doesn’t have any program. We had to really help them and have a big discussion about how to program it. Part of that programming was really about making a new space. They said it should be part of it, should be retail, and then we started to talk about if we could program it as a landscape. So, it went from the valley, the bridging to the old library, going to the bluff, the garden, the sun, the beach, the forest, and the sky. To be like an area where all the students could gather and be open, totally open for the public. Then using the colouring to do the program, to show how people could use it, so for the garden and the sun, it's really have the colours to mark it, and then the beach is absolutely the most popular. People gather there, it doesn't have that many normal chairs, so you have to use it in a different way. And in the sky, you have all this secondary and third way to be seated and, in the valley, in the front, it's a lot about gathering a lot of people, and extension to the outer area that they hadn't thought about at all, they thought they should build all the way to the walk. So, then to gather people inside the building and invite them to use it, and it's now a very urban space. The Ryerson University is really rating back, and the students are also telling researcher that they learn more, they meet more people, they have more discussion and the grades are getting up.

We now get into a system that we have to work digitally, and I always think yes, it's a tool, so we have also always to be analogue which means that these two things goes together. But how we know that we can push a lot of things in the digital world and in architecture, of course, we have the 3D way to work that we can make things that we never could have done before. For the Wild Reindeer Centre, up on Dovre, where Snøhetta is, this was really important for us that we could work with it. We have a really good workshop in the office and we even have an industrial robot that can make the models. And of course, the excuse for that was to think that we could make 3D drawings that we could send to the industry and they could produce it right away. We've now had the robot for 10 years, that's still not happened. So, we take time. But this is milled, the wooden model, in a small scale. And then we could send it to boat builders on the Norwegian west coast that made the wood of 20 by 20 centimetre logs of.. c'mon, "furu", “tall”, what's that called in English again? Pine! Pine wood, thank you. So, the pine wood and there's no glue, no nails, no nothing, just laid up together on one trailer going into the steel box and you see Snøhetta in the back. The exterior and the interior is the same. It is a shelter, it's a viewing point to watch wild animals and the landscape, and you have the shelter and you have a fireplace. That's where we were 150 people inside. And then, of course, the animals can be on the outside and look at the strange animals inside the glass box. This area used to be military area, so it's not pure nature. The military area was moved and then it was a big and a long transformation back to nature, but then still get people to go on a hike to have like a cultural experience in the landscape. The wild reindeer, there is a very strange story about them, because there are just two herds in Norway and one of them are at Dovre, that's why we have the Wild Reindeer Centre there. But the story is that they used to be in Southern Europe. We're going back to the last ice age, 10 000 years ago. Then the snow started to melt and the reindeer, they like the cold, so when it was melting, they just kept on walking after the melting snow and they ended up on Dovre. Which sounds like, is that really true? But they have found that this herd is the same that actually are in the cave paintings in Lascaux.

So, when we open the Wild Reindeer Centre, one of the ministers from France came up to have a look at it and we were invited for the National Centre for Cave Art in Lascaux in Montignac. This is a tiny place in Provence, a nice little village. And the site for the.. you see here, this is the existing caves that is here, and this is the site for the new cave museum. The story is kind of amazing. In 1942, not so many years ago, this was during the Second World War, three boys were out with their dog, there has been an amazing storm, so lot of trees have tripped over. It was dusk, so it was starting to get dark and the dog suddenly howled, it went away, and they couldn't find the dog. One of the guys, he saw that one of the trees were tripped over and he saw the root and he looked into it and had his torch and was setting the light inside the hole and discovered the caves. Which was totally amazing, they figure out they shouldn't tell anybody. Then when the war ended, they started to get visitors into it and they made a replica and that also was way too visited, and then they decided that they would make a new cave museum. So, how to work with a project that is actually 18 000 years old? It's really about long history. We looked into the landscape and we said that there is this section here, this is the valley, and this is how the caves look inside the green hill. This is where you actually can enter and go in and we should make a replica of this. We said that we have to display the landscape and how to get into the cave. We made three sort of super precise slots in the landscape. And we said that the first one is vertical and the two next ones are horizontal, so you open and you can get light into it. In the site, the site plan, it's a cultural area with a lot of patches, this is the site with the new cultural building and with the slot that is made like this.. with a very precise and it's at the foot of the hill. This section is super important that you can get in, you go into a darker area, you get some light and you go out, and you go in again, which you would have done in a cave. And the program consist of a lot of different things, so it's pretty complex. And then, of course, the replica of the cave. Here, they said that the budget should be 50/50 from the exhibition and the architecture, because the exhibition design was super important. You can see here one of the larger parts of the cave and that was made that they did a 3D scanning of the existing cave. This is probably the most complex 3D model we ever worked with. They even could make the acoustics, to scan the acoustics from the old cave to get that into the new. And, of course, our- the experience to enter in and they even figure out that the light they used then, like, not torches, but they burned fat and the light that could get from that is 12 lux, so we had to get the right amount of light inside the cave. There were, I think, ten artists that worked for two years to do the replica and then to get all the correct layers of the geology and how the fat, the paint would react to that. Super impressive how naturalistic and how artistic they worked with art 18 000 years ago. How we then display this in the cut in the landscape and to get the light in and then to have the building be part of the landscape that really invite people in and then, like this little light coming from the cave still is really important to make people to get attracted to go to see the museum.

Contextualized concept is also something we usually say when we work with a project, because what is actually the context and how can they react to the concept. And again, it's really about people and the process we're doing together with the people. After the library in Alexandria was opened in 2000-2001, we got invited to more competitions in the Middle East. And you know, until 2008 it was pretty crazy in the Middle East and they built the craziest projects. Some of them absolutely stopped because of the economic crisis and personally I think that was a good thing, because they gone too far. But one project that we were working on in Saudi Arabia is a cultural centre. The process was really important for us. Because to export from Norway to Saudi Arabia, you can say there's some equal things in the history, we both were lucky to find oil and then maybe it's just spent a little bit different in the two countries. But how then to have a process, because then we said, we had a big discussion in the office, we're 50/50 men and women, and we have, of course, more gay people, can we send the females and the gay to Saudi Arabia? Is that safe? Will they come back? We bought abayas in small, medium, and large. There were more of the project leaders in the project. Astrid to the right, she was the project leader, this is Bjørg. So, we had to wear them when we got to the airport. There was Aramco, one of the largest oil-producing companies in the world that was the client and of course inside our compound, so we could just [dress] totally normally. We said, the program of this project is really interesting, and we can make a difference to be part of that. Because it has a library, it has the first public cinema ever in Saudi Arabia, it has a big children’s discovery zone, and it has a very, very large outer area park. This is the site and the site as you can see, hmm, very inspiring. We thought, come on, the desert is so exotic, so we thought that okay, the program was made from each of the program was one pebble, like lying in the desert sand and we thought that okay, it's 50 or 70 degrees in the desert and you see this mirage and you go to it, and of course it disappears, because this will never happen. But the jury liked our project and we worked with past, present, and future. Lot of the program didn't need any daylight, so we could keep it below grade, also then we didn't need to cool it down as much, because it's not exposed to the sun. But the client said, we really like your project, we don't like the facade. We had like a metal, shiny facade. They said it should be black, polished granite. We thought, that's like a grey tomb; that will not happen. We had to look another round to find a good material for the facade and we looked into the landscape, how the oil is piped through the landscape, and started then to work with piping, to have all these pebbles. And tested it out one-to-one at the office and they made a one-to-one mock-up, six-by-six meters and it's super complicated 3D model, that is excavating it totally to be in the precise right, through all of the pebbles. The next thing, they said it was also from the rendering, the desert, pure as it is with this landing object, they said, "we hate the desert, you have to come up with something better". So, we had already, part of it was a green, Lush Garden to the oil museum that is there and then we made what we call the Monosurface. I think the most important with this project, there is one entry, male and females go into the same place, super important. Looked into the landscape, the geology, where you find the oil and then made a desert landscape in a different way. We figured out that the sand from the site could be rammed earth that we could expose both exterior and indoor, and the future, there's a lot of sun in this country, it will have just solar panels and LEDs that it's no cabling, so we could survive. So, Fuad, on the left side, he stayed at the office for a year to try to work together with us and he really- and his colleagues learned a lot about our working method that is transported back to Saudi Arabia. This centre will open next year with the first exhibition. We hope that there maybe be a Norwegian exhibition that will be part of it and it’s totally amazing landscape, we hope they will allow tourist to go there, because now you have to be invited.

Very last little project I'm going to show you. And maybe you would say okay, this is maybe not cultural or a museum. It's about local and global, because we know traveling is a big industry and food is an even- and to share a meal is super important. This is a tiny, tiny project on the south coast of Norway. Lindesnes, where there is a hotel, I think there live a thousand people in this little place, there's a hotel. Two brothers, they bought the hotel two years ago and they had this idea that “we want to make underwater restaurant”. And they asked us if we can help them to draw it. And they said the site is right outside the building, should be right here, we tested out and couldn't really manage to do it. After more tries, we said that is it possible to move it over here, so it's part of the landscape and not straight outside the not-so-beautiful hotel and then we managed to figure it out. So, it is this tube that is piercing through the water and you enter, and you have to walk, even if it's just 800 meter, that's part of the feeling, the notion. And this is together with maritime researchers, they have figured out that if we using light, sound and how you recreate an underwater landscape, you can teach fish to come. So, this is part of a research that they will do, the maritime, and then they also of course can display the fish for the people that go into the restaurant. So, this whale, concrete whale, is piercing through the water and it's super dramatic weather there in the winter. And then if you go inside, you will be sitting and watching the fish. It's space for 100 people to dine. And again, of course, the fish can then be trained and say hello to strange people inside there. Okay, they having their meal outside and people are paying a lot to having a meal inside, under water. So, this was under a year that is gone, it's constructed on-site, in the bay and just during the summer, it was just getting over to the correct site and it's all about now- it will open in March. This is the project we have got most hits on social media. It was totally crazy, in a week we had 700 million hits. Which is unbelievable. So, even a small project and we know that the social media is super important how to do that.

So, to wrap this up, I think it's important that you really think of how- I mean, for opening days and big events, they will always be important that a project works. But I think the everyday magic is more important. If it works for every day and it actually can push people to think that this is a good place, this has a good atmosphere, this is a place I want to come back, it's also flexible that it's usable for many things, it's super important. And it's really the core of any project that you can make this extra, to push it a little bit further and make some everyday magic. And always remember to have fun when you're working. Work together with people, take the best of all the professions that should be part of it, it's all about ownership. So, thank you for your time and if you want to see any other things from Snøhetta, please go on our website. Thank you.