- START THE DIALOGUE BY FINDING SIMILARITIES INSTEAD OF DIFFERENCES

Right in front of the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, on the big open square towards the City Hall, there is a special bench. It looks like a smile, a banana, a swing, a seesaw- or perhaps something else entirely.

Regardless of interpretation: If you sit down on the bench, you will slide down towards the middle. If you're lucky, there will be someone sitting next to you who is making the exact same journey. Gravity is hard to argue against.

The same, we feel, about the Nelson Mandela quote engraved on the installation: "The best weapon is to sit down and talk".

And this brings us to the core of Snøhetta's modus operandi, according to the company's founder Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, who has settled down on the bench.

- We are all on the same planet, we can't seem to do anything about that. Creating a bench that works with gravity to bring people together, I think is a nice translation of this simple fact. In many ways, this bench is a summary of many things in one very simple object.

Opens up oppertunities internationally

A few days earlier, Kjetil invites to a conversation at Snøhetta's headquarters on Vippetangen, where the Oslofjord is making a half-hearted attempt to freeze into ice.

Kjetil co-founded Snøhetta in 1987, and after 35 years, the company has achieved remarkable international success. One would need to be remarkably disengaged from Norwegian architecture and design not to hold a deep admiration for Kjetil and his team's outstanding accomplishments, both on a national scale, like Oslo's iconic opera house, and on an international level, exemplified by the library in Alexandria, Egypt.

But what does dialogue mean in practice for Snøhetta? Is dialogue good for business? And what tricks does Kjetil have up his sleeve to create a a good dialogue?

- A significant part of what we are doing is constantly entering into some kind of negotiation situation. Dialogue and conversation-based solutions have been a great help to open up the opportunities we get internationally, says Kjetil.

A negotiated architecture

As an international player working on large and complex projects, dialogue is alpha and omega for Snøhetta.

One of the most difficult dialogue situations the firm has embarked on is the work on the memorial pavilion at Ground Zero in New York, which was completed ten years after the twin towers collapsed on September 11, 2001. In that project we had to negotiate the requests and demands of a lot of different voices, and in such a situation, naturally there are some trade-offs that must be made

- Everyone who was affected was, in a way, against each other. The firefighters did not fully agree with the police officers about how the rescue work had been carried out. The Muslims did not agree with the Christians, the Catholics did not agree with the Protestants, the Republicans did not agree with the Democrats. Everyone was in a sort of vacuum of viewpoints on how the memorial pavilion should look like.

The solution was setting up meetings with up to 300 people in one room, where everyone basically disagreed. Through conversations and often conflicting proposals, slowly but surely an outline of a consensus gradually formed. The process was deftly managed by Snøhetta co-founder Craig Dykers.

- From the first day, we said that what we are doing here is a negotiated architecture. The very concept itself was the negotiation, the dialogue, the agreement.

Kjetil points to an example from his home country that underlines the important role time plays in being able to establish a meaningful dialogue.

- Look at the discussions we have had around the re-construction of the government headquarter in Oslo, a building that was severely damaged in the terror attacks on July 22, 2011. It is often not possible to decide on these big decisions too soon after the course of such terrible events. You often need the passing of time to be able to process such an extreme situation. However, during that period, it is important to maintain the dialogue, because it helps to bring about change.

Kjetil himself sat every day for almost a year in the waiting room to the office of the minister of education in Egypt drinking lemon cordial.

- Every day I came in, he said "unfortunately, it doesn't work today". And the next day: "No, it doesn’t work today either." But when you first enter into dialogue, you can use the advantage of having patience, says Kjetil.

- Without the dialogue on our part, with actually moving 14 people in our team to Cairo, being there on the ground, and keeping up the dialogue every day with the engineers, with the client, with the Ministry of Education and with contractors on the construction site, we would not have been able to realise the project. You must be there and be present. .

Similarities and differences

Even though Snøhetta has worked with great success with a dialogue-based approach for years, surely there must have been situations where the conversation falters and a common consensus slips further and further away?

Of course, assures Kjetil. At the same time, he points to a paradoxical aspect of dialogue:

- Where the dialogue often falls short is where we have assumed that we most in common. Where we initially assumed that there are greater cultural differences, it is often easier to gain understanding for a dialogue-based process than between two Norwegians that think they think alike.

Where the cultural differences are significant, it is essential to start by finding out what you have in common.

- If we agree on our commonalities, we have a greater understanding of the differences as they emerge. That way we can also gradually become more and more firm in our own positions. Dialogue does not mean that we should renounce what we stand for and what we want to achieve.

Idealism and profitability

According to Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, Snøhetta spent more than 30 years before they started making a profit. He believes business in Norway has should learn to be more patient.

- It's no use thinking that if we don't make money after three years, we should give up. In our industry that would be fatal - we hadn't managed to build a single house in three years. Having a long-term perspective is integral to working in architecture. You have to be patient financially.

Maintaining the commitment and idealism of everyone who works at Snøhetta - not only in the Oslo office, but in New York, San Francisco, Adelaide, Innsbruck, Paris and Hong Kong, as well as the two newly established studios in Melbourne and Shenzhen - is bottom line in everything we do.