Schmidt Hammer Lassen

It has been a good year for Schmidt Hammer Lassen, which is building the €190 million headquarters for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, despite coming second in the international competition. The ICC considered the top three entries on equal terms before picking SHL’s over the first-placed design by Dusseldorf-based Ingenhoven Architects.

And this was just the highest-profile of a slew of competitions won by the Scandinavian practice last year. A week later, it landed a five-star hotel in Munich, followed by two libraries in Canada —Halifax and Edmonton — and a €77 million masterplan and extension of Kolding Hospital in Denmark. It also beat Snøhetta and Daniel Libeskind to design a 54,000sq m concert, conference and hotel complex in Malmö, Sweden.

Meanwhile, it won several awards and topped-out the new library at Aberdeen University, which is due to open in 2011. This year will also see the completion of a college in Aarhus and “the crystal and the cloud” extensions to Nykredit, its 10-storey office building in Copenhagen.