Hunt Library architects are blowing up

What does NC State’s Hunt Library have in common with Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei, philanthropist Melinda Gates, and A Single Man director Tom Ford?

The architecture firm that designed the university’s now-iconic library has been named among those luminaries in the Wall Street Journal Magazine’s 2016 Innovators Awards. Snøhetta, whose design for a library of the future for NC State has become the hot international architecture firm.

Since the Hunt Library opened, Snøhetta has launched a large expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has been progressively redesigning Manhattan’s Times Square, among many other projects. And the firm doesn’t just design buildings. Next year, Norway’s krone banknotes will feature a pixelated seascape of Snøhetta design.

As detailed in their WSJ Innovators Award profile, Snøhetta’s work is characterized by a project-specific, conceptual commitment to openness rather than by a recognizable design sensibility or theory. It’s a perfect fit for the NCSU Libraries’ own commitment to being open to the present and future resource and services needs of NC State’s students, faculty and researchers.

As if the WSJ feature weren’t enough for Snøhetta, Forbes magazine also published a recent profile that focuses on their innovative work process and the relationship between the firm’s design principles and their management style. The article discusses the benefits of their multi-disciplinary design teams and the humanity of their designs. For example, they created an intentionally narrow pedestrian bridge in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art so that people would have to interact with each other as they pass.

One interesting process at Snøhetta is a kind of internal job exchange called “transpositioning,” in which employees move staff members into other roles, akin to orchestra musicians practicing on different instruments. Even their office environments are considered, with bathroom walls painted in unusual colors to give workers’ eyes a break, and even the most senior employees’ desks are placed in an open office layout.