People, context and collaboration in Snøhetta’s practice: a conversation with Richard McIntyre

People, context and collaboration in Snøhetta’s practice: a conversation with Richard McIntyre - by Serena L’Assainato 

Through the reflections of Richard McIntyre, Senior Architect at Snøhetta Innsbruck, this conversation explores the studio’s holistic and people-centred approach to architecture, shaping a design philosophy grounded in collaboration, context, and experiences. Richard highlights how Snøhetta’s ethos emerges not only from its projects but from the collective processes and shared values that define its culture.

“We work as a collective but each individual voice is important to be heard, to make sure that the voice is really collective and not just coming from the strongest personality pushing through.”

Central to the studio’s identity is the principle that people come first - from internal collaboration to the experience of those who inhabit their projects. The diverse mix of backgrounds and disciplines within the office fosters a continuous reflection on communication, cooperation, and flexibility of roles.

The Space Between: context as a design driver.

One of the main ideas leading the projects of the studio is ‘The Space Between’. This refers to - as Richard mentioned during his lecture - “the leftover spaces, spaces that maybe are underused or undervalued when you don’t have enough public space. So, it is about trying to create opportunities where we can’t have a strong intervention in very constrained contexts.” This is what happened in the case of the 550 Madison Avenue Garden for example.

Serena: It is interesting how this project transformed an underused space into this interior public garden. During your lecture, you said that the idea here was to create some intimate areas for people, but I was wondering about the atmosphere that you can have inside this kind of place, with this very high ceiling. Does it not feel more like a cathedral rather than an intimate space?

Richard: For a New Yorker it’s very intimate. For Bologna it would be insane. When you take into consideration the context of the space and of the city, you realize that it’s quite an intimate space in New York. It’s always this idea of working with context. A New Yorker walking here would feel so intimate and tiny, and for us it would feel like a cathedral. It is an important question to always think about the sense of scale. It’s different between a building, where we have controlled sizes that we generally work with, which control the proportions, and a public space, where the context of the scales is completely different. The trees are huge but when you see them in a city, they don’t feel so big.

Between Places and Projects: A personal perspective

Serena: What about your personal story? How did you end up working in Innsbruck?

Richard: My partner moved to Munich, so I was planning to move there too. I hadn’t even started applying yet when a friend mentioned that Snøhetta was looking for a landscape architect in Innsbruck. I applied on the 24th of December, the last day of the application process. That’s Christmas day in Austria, and they replied to my email that same day. I was interviewed about 4 days later, and they offered me a position during the interview. It was very quick.

Serena: You’ve been working at Snøhetta for 3 years now. What was one of the most exciting projects you worked on?

Richard: One interesting project came up from a collaboration with some people who came from YAC. They had a summer program for 2 months, and it was about a project on a park called Sigurtà Park, near Lake Garda, which is the largest private park in Europe. We went there because the owner was planning to change the entrance situation. It was supposed to be just a small collaboration of 2 months but in the end, they produced so much work, and the client loved it. The result became quite successful so this project might go ahead. It was quite impressive what they have done. There were a lot of details and the quality of the work made it look really nice. It was good to see this real motivation from these 4 people.