As a practice based in Norway, with its annual extremes of near-endless days and nights, do you think that at Snøhetta you are particularly concerned with questions of darkness and light?

Yes, it is something we have always been interested in. Recently the lighting company Zumtobel asked us to design their annual report, and we used it as a research document, turning it into a project called “Living the Northern Light” to think about architecture in general within the Arctic Circle. We wanted to learn something from doing it that we could put back into our architectural work.

Do you identify a particular sensibility that comes from long, dark winters?

Well, there are some presumptions about this. For instance, the idea that you get more depressed as it gets darker and closer to winter is spoken of as a basic truth.