Dykers is more compact and less rumpled-looking than Thorsen, but he is similarly self-effacing. It took me a couple of days to realize that Elaine Molinar, who also works in the New York office and has been a member of the firm since the Alexandria project, is his wife. (“There are people at the company who didn’t know for several years that we were married,” he told me.) They met in the early nineteen-eighties at the University of Texas at Austin, where both were undergraduates and where Molinar studied ballet before switching to architecture. They live in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn, near Fulton Landing, and commute to work by ferry.

Snøhetta opened its New York office after receiving the commission for the World Trade Center pavilion, and one afternoon I walked over to the site with Anne Lewison and Aaron Dorf, Snøhetta architects who have been involved in the pavilion’s design for several years. We put on hard hats and yellow vests, and, after a security check, we entered a gate at the edge of the construction zone. The site is still chaotic, but the part of the plaza surrounding the memorial fountains—which are set within the spaces once occupied by the foundations of the Twin Towers and were designed by Michael Arad and Peter Walker—is already one of the city’s most popular tourist destinations. Snøhetta’s pavilion, now tentatively scheduled to open in late 2013, is an asymmetrical three-story crystal of stainless steel and glass which appears to have fallen from the sky and embedded itself in the plaza. It will contain the security checkpoint for the 9/11 Museum, which was designed by the American firm Davis Brody Bond, as well as a food area, a small auditorium, and a sanctuary-like room reserved for the survivors of 9/11 victims. Designing the pavilion was complicated by the fact that no part of the building has its own foundation: most of the structure sits on top of a PATH station, which was designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, and the rest overhangs the museum. “We couldn’t even add things,” Lewison said. “We couldn’t say, ‘Could you just give us a little more cantilever here so that we can pick up the north side of our building?’ So the north side of our building is actually hung from a shaft at our roof level.”

Lewison said that she and her colleagues had viewed the project’s constraints as a challenge rather than as an annoyance, and had employed several optical tricks to make the building seem bigger. The irregularity of its shape and subtle horizontal stripes in the glass-and-stainless-steel cladding, she said, make the pavilion’s dimensions unclear to someone viewing it from the plaza. “You don’t know how big it is,” she said. “If you’re standing close to it, it looks like it could be really tall, or really long, and if you look along one of the sides you have a sense of great length.” The ambiguity is similar to the infinite-edge effect on the roof of the Oslo Opera.

Snøhetta’s largest American project currently under construction is an expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The current museum building, which opened in 1995, was designed by the Swiss architect Mario Botta, and it’s a darkly forbidding structure: a red-brick fortress on a crowded urban block in what used to be a marginal neighborhood. Snøhetta will leave the Botta building mostly intact; the addition, when viewed from the street, will look a little like a white ocean liner parked behind and above it, and it will roughly triple the museum’s gallery space. Accommodating the expected crowds—SFMOMA’s annual attendance has more than doubled since 1995, to roughly six hundred and fifty thousand, and the expansion will attract more—will require some of the same feeling for urban dynamics that guided Snøhetta’s design for the Opera. This past summer, the engineering firm Arup, which is also working on the project, ran a computer simulation called a “visitor-flow model,” which enabled Snøhetta to observe how elements of its design would be likely to affect the movements of museumgoers. The architects were able to fill a computer model of the building with hundreds of virtual human visitors, and study what happened. “Each person gets programmed,” Dykers said. “Weight, height, walking speed, interests. Then you set them in motion, and you can see where you need more stairs or bathrooms or ticket booths, and you can actually see what people’s irritability levels are.”

The goal of such an exercise isn’t always to eliminate sources of irritability; sometimes, he said, the most interesting results come from creating impediments rather than removing them. Thorsen told me, “The roof of the Opera enabled people to experience certain things they hadn’t experienced before. I think that’s interesting in architecture—to generate new situations. So you dislocate and you locate. You remove known obstacles and you introduce new ones. By doing that, you change the movement, and by changing the movement you change the perception of the space. And it’s exactly the same thing with Times Square.”

Dykers has a brother, five years older, who was a gifted structural engineer until, in his late thirties, he suffered a cerebral aneurysm and, as a consequence of surgery that was intended to repair it, lost his ability to remember new things. “You’ve probably seen the movie ‘Memento,’ ” Dykers told me one day. “My brother is basically like that, but not as dramatic. He doesn’t tattoo reminders on his skin, but he keeps papers in all his pockets and calls them his memory. His math skills are still amazing. I play chess with him sometimes, and if he leaves the table and comes back he won’t remember whether he’s white or black or what his strategy was. But he will notice, when he sits down again, that you are obviously on that side of the table and he’s on this side, and he’ll see where the pieces are on the board, and in his mind he’ll try to retrace the game backward and then run it forward—and that gives him an advantage, paradoxically, because he sees the mistakes. And he will almost always beat you.” The brother can’t function as an engineer anymore, but he has inadvertently helped Dykers in his work as an architect, because his brain injury, Dykers said, makes him a perfectly naïve test subject. “He can’t rely on memory to navigate through spaces. If we’re in a restaurant and he goes to the toilet, he won’t remember how to get back to the table, even if he’s been there ten times. So I watch him, and try to understand what clues he’s using to move through unfamiliar surroundings.”

How people move through unfamiliar surroundings has been a central issue for Snøhetta in Times Square. David Burney, who runs the city’s Department of Design and Construction, told me, “Ninety per cent of the people using Times Square are pedestrians, yet ninety per cent of the space was devoted to cars.” In 2009, the city began trying to shift that balance, by converting especially troublesome sections of roadway into pedestrian zones. It covered the asphalt in those zones with paint—in Times Square, the paint is now mostly tan (like beach sand) and blue (like the ocean)—and it installed café tables, chairs, and large plastic planters. The modified road plan improved traffic flow and reduced the number of accidents—“They took away the knot,” Dykers told me—but managing the tidal surges of pedestrians remained problematic. In 2011, the city engaged Snøhetta to complete the transformation.

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One afternoon, Dykers and I met at his office and then took the subway uptown to look at the site. As we waited for an express at Fourteenth Street, he said that in most stations you can anticipate where the doors of the next train will open by looking for concentrations of chewing-gum splats near the edges of the platforms. (Subway riders apparently tend to spit out gum either just before entering or just after exiting a train.) Much crowd behavior is predictable, Dykers said, but it isn’t perceived consciously by the crowds themselves. “Your brain is working continuously, gauging things like reflections and space and shapes,” he said. “You’ll hear people say that they’re more likely to collide with other people in Penn Station than they are in Grand Central, and the reason is that when you have hundreds and hundreds of people in one place there’s a natural movement that your body will make to get out of the way, and in Penn Station there’s not enough room to do that. It’s counterintuitive, but I think one reason Grand Central works so well is the kiosk in the middle of the main concourse. You’d think it would be a disaster, since it’s right in the center of everything, but it pushes people to the sides and creates more flow. It’s like fish swimming around rocks in a stream.”