snohetta - with a slash through the 'o'...

this day last week i attended a lecture at the university of arkansas, fay jones school of architeecture...craig dykers of snohetta presented a lecture entitled "culture/architecture/people"...

it was actually great to attend a lecture like this...i felt very at home, the general atmosphere and crowd had the same samey samey feel lectures tend to do so back at home...do you know what i mean...???

anyway...craig dykers presented a great lecture, an insight into the work of snohetta (with a slash through the 'o') and an insight into his own quirky personality and design approach...

the company is actually named after the 'snohetta' mountain in norway...

craig referred to the design process as climbing a mountain...sometimes when you think you've reached something - you realise that you've still got a bit more to go...i really liked that analogy...

he spoke a bit about his working office environment and his collaborative efforts in dealing with other people...when speaking about design and architecture and buildings and the design process, he prefers not to use the word 'context'...a word often used in architectural terminology...

craig feels that this word has lost its power as a word in architecture, instead he likes to use the word 'condition''...the word condition brings with it notions of the physical, mental and psychological aspects according to craig...

he then went on to talk about his first major project, the 'royal library of alexandria'...

what struck me more about dyker's notions of this building went beyond the design and architecture...grandiose and all as it is, but he managed to concentrate on the smaller details that as an architect meant something to him...a list of all the people he dealt with while working on the project, fusing together the backgrounds, sensitivity, language and cultural differences...from 'princess caroline of monaco' to 'antisevix pest control alexandria'...

craig then went on to talk about another project...the 'oslo opera house'...

basing his talk on this subject on other peoples pictures he found online, dykers spoke of his work again with a sense of humour...another competition win based on 3 conceptual elements, the wave wall, the carpet and the factory...when speaking of the opera house, he said, ''everything has to exist and look good out of the zones of which you are comfortable''...

he managed to combine humourously the painstaking angst that many architects and designers suffer at the hands of code and legislation...he spoke about politics and code, litigiousness and architecture...

2 very exciting features from the interior that caught my eye were the undulating oak wall and the stage curtain...

the architect had asked the contractor to randomly fix the oak struts...but the contractor wouldn't do random...he refused, so the architect ended up inviting school children to come and place the struts instead...

the stage curtain is simply stunning...dykers commissioned an america artist to create the stage curtain...she worked with digital images of aluminum foil which reflects and adopts the colors of the auditorium, the images were then transferred to a computer driven loom...

like craig dyker's did himself...i'm going to leave you with images of the opera house from other people and not from the architects website...

all pics via other people via flicker...

http://www.snoarc.no/

http://www.flickr.com/