The Muse

If you find yourself on Park Ave. with some time to kill, swing by the Scandinavia House (at 58 Park Avenue at 38th Street) to view their new exhibit, celebrating the work of Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta.

Snøhetta was elected a few years ago to design a certain cultural institution on the memorial grounds of the World Trade Center towers. The project has seen a number of adjustments over the years but is now expected to be completed in 2012. Here is a blown up rendering of part of it on display at the exhibit:

And below again is a variety of working models for the project:

The forms and shapes presented in Snøhetta's projects are not completely unfamiliar to me. I find their structures very similar to those of Graft, an LA-based firm.  Both also have a number of notable projects in the Persian Gulf that are either on the boards or helped establish the iconic aesthetic that has begun to characterize that part of the world, particularly the U.A.E.

"Oh my god, it's so futuristic," I overheard another visitor to Snøhetta: architecture – landscape – interior exclaim. Not an incredibly eloquent description but she got one word right.

Futuristic:

...more renderings...

A 3D model of the King Abdulaziz Center for Knowledge and Culture, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. This project is in progress.

The exhibit gives pretty detailed explanations and visuals of projects that put/continue to put Snøhetta on the map, such as the Library of Alexandria, the Lillehammer Art Museum, and the Ras Al-Khaimah Gateway Project. 

A variety of models that display how the firm experiments.

Perhaps most interesting to me, was the written history of the World Trade Center site, which always had a "long history of conflict and danger."

According to the display, due to treacherous swamps that plagued the area, Wappani and Algonquin language peoples had been accustomed to avoiding it during the pre-colonial occupation of Manhattan. And when the Rockefeller family proposed the new World Trade Center be built on this land that had once been the site of Robert Moses' vetoed plan for a Brooklyn Battery Bridge in the 1930s, the housing that stood was brought down with much controversy.

Hopefully, the expected completion date of 2012 for the memorial project is achieved, as I'd love to see their designs made into a reality.

To learn more about it, visit the exhibit, open until April 3. While you're at it, stop at the gift shop, and grab a bit at their restaurant.

Snøhetta has offices in Oslo and in New York City (Broadway). They have a number of published books on the market, such as my favorite, Snøhetta Conditions.

~AnnMarie Marano, web editor