130 | 131
1st ProofTitle: BA: Architectural Design
Job No: PD0710-67/4028Chapter 3 final (3.4)_.qxd:layouts to chapter one 7/24/10 11:07 AM Page 131
Initial ideas › Development and detail› Construction and occupationInterview with Craig Dykers and Kjetil Thorsen
of SnøhettaYou have experience of working at many different scales
and have said that a family of five could be as complex
as a city. What are the advantages in your design process
of making such a conscious link between the scales?
Kjetil Thorsen
You move towards organising elements in relationship to
each other, they start talking together.
Craig Dykers
It’s very difficult to imagine things as they may appear in
reality, as they will be when they're completed; so going back
and forth between scales allows you to move more freely
between the built environment and the imagined one. So
in that sense I guess there’s no such thing as a real scale.
Kjetil Thorsen
But scale is a difficult issue, because depending on the
distance to the object, obviously scale changes. It changes
in relationship to where you have your eye. If you look at
a city from the plane it might be a living room; so scale often
is portrayed at the level of content it has, relating to how
close you might be observing it. You could also say that
objects change scale in themselves depending on where
you are located.
Comparing two projects: the Tubaloon and the Opera
House, which have similar purposes but are very different
in scale, would you say that one was more complex than
the other?
Kjetil Thorsen
The difference of complexities is defined by the way one
simplifies a task. It is not the way you’re looking for inherent
complexities but how you try to solve these complexities in
the simplest manner. In that sense, large-scale and small-
scale projects don’t differ. Maybe large-scale projects allow
you to experiment more, simply because the economy
follows the size of the project. This experimentation demands
more design process control because it is more difficult to
maintain a thread throughout the process. The Tubaloon took
four months, so it doesn’t allow you to change your mind
while you’re doing it.Text
1st ProofTitle: BA: Architectural Design
Job No: PD0710-67/4028Chapter 3 final (3.4)_.qxd:layouts to chapter one 7/26/10 7:38 AM Page 131