The university of Göteborg is the common denominator among the members of Grön, who all coincided there either as teachers or students. Four natives of the peninsula group that composes Scandinavia – the Norwegian Fredrik Lund (1959), the Dane Henriette Michaelsen (1960), the Swede Martin Forsby (1962) and the Finn Mika Määttä (1961) – form the studio whose name, the color green, sums up a shared interest in a silent architecture that endeavors to be the built link between man and the natural environment. The premise is combined with a determination to follow in the footsteps of the pioneers of Nordic functionalism, such as Asplund or Aalto, and to stay clear of fashions and tendencies removed from the geophysical and cultural circumstances of the country they work in. Winning first prize in the 1996 international competition for a restaurant in the Göteborg Botanical Gardens launched the career of this quartet as a whole, and since then it has also been able to carry out its proposal for the conversion of a former gymnasium into Sweden’s first faculty entirely dedicated to television...
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