I'm an architect, urban planner, and design director, based in Oslo. For the last twenty - five years I've been splitting time between large built work - schools, offices, masterplans, transport, industrial campuses - and the strategic side of design: advising developers, investors, and municipalities on what a site can become before the architects are hired.

I trained in Rotterdam, at the Willem de Kooning Academy, and started out at Erick van Egeraat Associated Architects in the mid-1990s before a year as a visiting tutor at the same school. From there: Antwerp, with Jo Crepain. Then Oslo in 2001 — Niels Torp Architects, Dark Architects, LSA Architects - before co-founding INDARC in 2008. I joined PLUS Architects in 2010 and was made partner in 2012; over the years that followed the studio grew to sixteen people and won three-quarters of its commissions through competition. After ten years at PLUS I took an unusual detour - a year at Electronic Arts in California, on spatial design for next-generation game engines - then design director roles at MAP, and AFRY's architecture division back in Oslo. I went independent in 2024.

Across all of that the conviction is the same: buildings aren't just iconic statements, they're systems - social, technical, ecological, financial - and the design's job is to keep those systems in conversation with each other instead of letting any one of them drown out the rest. The projects I'm drawn to are the ones where that conversation is hardest: a 100-kilometre arctic highway, an 800,000 m² circular battery campus, a 62,000 m² multi-modal gateway district in Lugano, a wetlands park inside a working city, a 220,000 m² residential quarter in Moscow. Constraints clarify more than they constrain.

I draw on aviation and cars as much as on architecture - disciplines where form is fully constrained by function and somehow becomes beautiful anyway, which is most of what I think architecture should be.

I work in four languages (English, Dutch, Norwegian, Russian), and the cross - pollination keeps the thinking honest.