Beate Hølmebakk, born 1963 in Oslo, studied architecture at the Oslo School of Architecture and as a visiting student at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union under John Hejduk.
After finishing her studies she worked for Raimund Abraham in New York before returning to Oslo to work with a couple of different architectural practices before she started teaching at AHO in the mid 90’ties.
Beate Hølmebakk has worked with fictional architecture; projects exploring the potential for architectural interpretation of literary texts. Her series of houses based on female literary characters received a medal from The Erich Schelling Architecture Foundation and have been exhibited and presented in Norway and abroad.
From 2003 Hølmebakk has run a small architectural practice, Manthey Kula, together with partner Per Tamsen. Their first realized project, a hydro power station for Statkraft was finished late fall 2007, the project is nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award 2009.
Parallel to practicing Hølmebakk has been teaching, from 2003-2005 as half-time Artistic Professor at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg and from 2007 as a half-time professor at AHO in Oslo.