Snøhetta began in 1987 as a group of young architects and landscape architects sharing an office in Storgata, Oslo, united by the complaint that landscape was always designed last, with whatever money the building had not spent. Their answer was to design building and ground as one thing. They took the name of the highest peak in Dovrefjell, and in 1989 won the open competition for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt — a tilted disc cut into the ground, decided before the practice had built anything at all. The Oslo Opera House, the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet's home in Bjørvika, applied the same move at home: a roof you walk up. The office now works from Oslo and New York and describes sustainability, following the 1987 Brundtland report, as its founding brief.
