Kjetil Trædal Thorsen

Founding Partner, Snøhetta, Norway

Kjetil Trædal Thorsen is a Founding Partner of Snøhetta based in Oslo, Norway and is a member of the Holcim Foundation Awards 2025 jury for Europe.

Kjetil Trædal Thorsen

Kjetil Trædal Thorsen is a Founding Partner of Snøhetta based in Oslo, Norway and is a member of the Holcim Foundation Awards 2025 jury for Europe.

Kjetil Trædal Thorsen co-founded Snøhetta, an integrated architecture, landscape architecture and design company in 1989 together with Craig Dykers and Christoph Kapeller. The studio focuses on well-being, biodiversity, sustainability, and empowering the communities where they work. Snøhetta is based in New York City, USA and Oslo, Norway, and has five additional global offices.

As a founding partner of Snøhetta, Kjetil Trædal Thorsen has had a hand in some of the finest contemporary cultural buildings. From Oslo Opera House, which rises from the fjord like a glacier, to the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Saudi Arabia, which glistens under the desert sun like giant pebbles, and to the International Cave Art Centre in Lascaux, carved into the landscape like a ravine – his architecture takes on imaginative forms that are sensitive to their surroundings and conducive to human interaction.

He is a frequent lecturer internationally and worked as Professor of Architecture at the Institute of Experimental Architecture at the University of Innsbruck, Austria (2004-08).

He studied architecture in Graz, Austria (1985).