SNOHETTA WINS MIES VAN DER ROHE ARCHITECTURE AWARD

According to the New York Times_, the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet House in Oslo, designed by the firm Snohetta, was named the winner of the 2009 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture―Mies van der Rohe Award. The prize is given every other year by the European Union and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe in Barcelona, Spain. The two groups announced that the award, which comes with a prize of about eighty thousand dollars, had been given to Snohetta, an architecture and interior design firm located in Oslo. Snohetta designed the structure, which comprises one thousand rooms and was made from thirty-six thousand fitted pieces.