Kjetil Trædal Thorsen is a Norwegian architect. In 1987, he co-founded the architecture firm Snøhetta.[1]
Thorsen was born on 14 June 1958 on the Norwegian coastal island of Karmøy. After several years in Germany and England, he studied architecture in Graz, Austria.[2] He had practiced at the office of Espen Tharaldsen (Arbeidsgruppen Hus) in Bergen (1982–1983), Ralph Erskine in Stockholm (1983–1984) and David Sandved in Haugesund (1985).[3] In 1987, he formed an architectural practice in Oslo with a group of young architects. They named it Snøhetta after the tallest mountain in the Dovrefjell National Park.[4]
Thorsen led several award winning design competitions for public buildings around the world. He led the Snøhetta teams designing the museum built for the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway,[1] the 2007 Serpentine Gallery temporary Pavilion in London designed with Olafur Eliasson, the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina library in Alexandria, Egypt,[2] and the new Oslo Opera House in Oslo, Norway.[2] He was a founder of Norway’s foremost architecture gallery, Galleri Rom in 1986.
Thorsen had been a professor at the Institute for Experimental Studies in Architecture of the University of Innsbruck since 2004.