Renowned Architect Keynotes Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities Symposium

Norway’s Kjetil Thorsen, Snøhetta founding partner, shares insights and HouseZero® inspirations

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 28, 2025 — Against the backdrop of Earth Week 2025, leading building performance and sustainability experts, including a Founding Partner of Norway’s acclaimed Snøhetta architectural design firm, recently convened on the Harvard campus to address the formidable challenges facing the evolving built environment amid a rapidly-changing – and warming – planet. Organized by the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, presented in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Adaptive Environments / Environmental Adaptions, examined over two days an array of data-driven sustainable practices and adaptive design approaches; they collectively emphasized the unique role of designers as not only creators of form, but as stewards of both social and ecological systems.

In his keynote, Environmental Adaptions, Kjetil Thorsen, architect and co-founder of Snøhetta, underscored that the building industry is responsible for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions. Faced with this harsh reality, Mr. Thorsen emphasized the pivotal role architects play in driving sustainable change and reflected on the possibility of new aesthetics when it comes to environmentally harmonious structures. “We [Snøhetta] were trying to define ‘form follows environment’ as a way forward,” he said. “What does that do to the perception of beauty? How do you actually meet this criteria when you say, ‘OK, I want this building to perform at its best for natural ventilation’? What does that mean for the shape, and what kind of beauty does that shape then give you?”

To illustrate how environmental and social responsibility can inform and inspire innovative design, he presented a number of Snøhetta projects, including the Library of Alexandria, Egypt, the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, Harvard HouseZero (below, right), and Vertikal Nydalen (below, left).

Two buildings—Harvard HouseZero, a data-driven living laboratory and headquarters for the Center for Green Buildings and Cities, and Vertikal Nydalen, Norway’s first naturally climatized mixed-use building—served as focal points during Adaptive Environments, the second segment of the symposium. Both buildings challenge conventional approaches to sustainable design and existing technologies, offering new possibilities for how architecture can respond to environmental challenges.

Ali Malkawi, Founding Director of the Center for Green Buildings and Cities, who worked closely with Mr. Thorsen and his team from concept through completion on HouseZero, remarked “What we are building isn’t just about HouseZero. It’s about what becomes possible at scale. It’s about what emerges when research, design, and experimentation converge to shape responsive, human-centric environments. The questions we are exploring—about adaptability, intelligence, and environmental responsibility—aren’t abstract or distant. They are urgent, tangible, and within reach.”

The Adaptive Environments program featured 12 presentations and a panel discussion with leading voices across design, academia, and engineering from The Harvard Graduate School of Design, The Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, The Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Snøhetta, Skanska, and FutureBuilt.

Topics ranged from historical design principles, material innovations, and technological concepts to emissions and the emerging role of artificial intelligence and automation in the design process. Speakers sought to explore what architecture can—and should—be in the face of our rapidly changing world, and how adaptive principles and cross-disciplinary collaboration are essential to creating a greener, more inclusive built environment.

As Mr. Thorsen remarked, “I believe the profession of architecture can still do a lot when it comes to solving our future.”

Read the full event program here.
Watch Kjetil Thorsen’s keynote here.