The 2009 Mies van der Rohe Award went to Snøhetta for their design of the Oslo Opera. Snøhetta seems to be one of the first architectural offices to have worked on a global scale from their very beginning. Even if the office was founded in Oslo as a collaborative studio of architects and landscape architects, it really got a kick start when the American Craig Dykers, the Austrian Christoph Kapeller in Los Angeles, and Norwegian Kjetil Thorsen in Oslo decided to work together on the competition for the Library of Alexandria in Egypt in 1989 — and won. And not just did they win this prestigious international competition, but they also realized the building, earning instant international acclaim. Today, the office has two principals, Kjetil Thorsen and Craig Dykers, steering the office in a remarkably unpretentious and non-authoritarian manner. Over the twenty years of its existence, Snøhetta has produced a broad spectrum of works, the majority in the cultural sector, that reflect an almost equally broad spectrum of styles and approaches: from the monumental eclecticism of the Alexandria Library and the Oslo Opera to the barren conceptualism of the Kivik Art Center in Malmö and the Fishing Museum in Karmøy, and from the social engagement of the Sandvika Cultural Center and the Petter Dass Museum in Alstahaug to the atmospheric promises of the Turner Museum in Margate, England, the Gateway project in Ras Al Khaimah, and the King Abdulaziz Center for Knowledge and Culture in Dahran, Saudi Arabia (Photo).