Background and experience
Beate Hølmebakk was born in Oslo in 1963. She studied architecture at the Oslo School of Architecture (AHO) under Sverre Fehn, Wenche Selmer and Christian Norberg-Schulz and as a visiting student at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union under John Hejduk.
Hølmebakk has been a professor at AHO since 2007. Currently she is the 2025 Patrick Geddes Visiting Fellow at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. She has been artistic professor at Chalmers University, Sweden and visiting professor at the University of Navarra, Spain, and Cornell University, USA.
In 2022, Hølmebakk received the Swedish Prince Eugene Medals for outstanding artistic achievement.
Areas of responsibility
Together with Chris Engh, Hølmebakk teaches the master studio The Architectural Project (TAP) and diploma.
Teaching
In the TAP studio, we understand architectural quality as the interaction between buildings' artistic and constructional design. We promote works within the field of architecture – buildings as well as projects – which contribute to safeguarding and developing the discipline in an intelligent, responsible, and meaningful way. We teach building design with an emphasis on conceptual clarity, constructional logic, and architectural form. We believe in the unbuilt project's potential to contribute to the disciplinary field as independent and valid architectural work.
In the studio, the students work individually with their projects and most often the studio's briefs are set with individual variations. TAP usually has sixteen students and a clear weekly structure with defined milestones. The students are to develop and cultivate their architectural ideas by using the analogue and digital tools of the discipline: sketching, drawing, and model making. In studio tutoring and in reviews, we emphasize the students' dedication to the task and their ability to give their projects architectural character. The studio is internationally oriented, and we therefore often invite international practitioners as lecturers and critics.
TAP includes two master's courses: Building from Context (autumn) and Building from Content (spring) in addition to diploma and pre-diploma guidance.
Building from Context: In this studio the architectural possibilities and limitations that follow from given external conditions form the starting point for the project work.
Building from Content: In this studio the architectural possibilities and limitations that arise from the building program itself form the starting point for the project work.
Research
Since 2004 Hølmebakk has been running the architectural office Manthey Kula together with partner Per Tamsen. Manthey Kula’s production spans from explorative projects to public commissions. The work is widely published and presented in several architecture exhibitions. There are three monographs about the office: About MK, Libria 2017, Rotunda IV - Manthey Kula, Trema Förlag, 2022 and Manthey Kula - Facts and Fictions A+U # 24:05.
Manthey Kula's Archipelago Project was acquired by Frac Centre -Val de Loire in 2017 and Hølmebakk's Virginia Project was acquired by the National Museum of Norway in 2021.
Projects by Manthey Kula have been nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2009, 2011, 2019, and 2022.