May 2013

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Iceland is more renowned for its recent financial crash than for its architecture, but its capital is home to some remarkable buildings, including a dazzling concert hall in Reykjavík designed by Henning Larsen Architects and Batteríið.

Just below the Arctic Circle in the North Atlantic lies a barren, sparsely populated island which has nevertheless had an extraordinary impact on the world.

‘If you were to…go there you would find it a country very remarkable in aspect, little more than a desert, yet the most romantic of all deserts even to look at: a huge volcanic mass still liable to eruptions of mud, ashes and lava…. Anyone travelling there I think would be apt to hope…that its terrific and melancholy beauty might have once been illum-inated by a history worthy of its strangeness: nor would he hope in vain: for the island I am speaking of is called Iceland.’

Thus wrote William Morris after his first visit to the island in 1871. He was drawn there by his deep interest in the Icelandic Sagas, those stirring tales of daily life and struggle that were later recorded in illuminated volumes as fine and as beautiful as any medieval Bible and which, now repatriated from Denmark and exhibited in the Culture House in Reykjavík, are revered as national treasures and icons. They testify to the vigour and importance of medieval Iceland: for 1,000 years ago and more this remote island was a hub for Norse trading routes and a vital cultural centre.

When Morris visited, Iceland was slowly recovering from a disastrous 18th century, when the population actually fell because of plague and famine caused by volcanic eruptions. Today, people visit Iceland for the rugged volcanic landscape, to see geysers and to swim in hot spring water, to see birds or the Northern Lights. Few go to see archi-tecture – but architecture there certainly is. Iceland’s medieval churches were largely of timber construction and have perished, so that the earliest buildings now date from the 18th century. When Morris was there, Reykjavík was a small town by a harbour with little houses of timber, painted black, with white-painted window frames, each in a little garden. He thought it ‘not a very attractive place, yet not very bad, better than a north-country town in England.’ Today, although much bigger, with more masonry buildings dating from the 20th century, that rather modest Nordic character survives. The most prominent building, placed on high ground and rising drama-tically above the corrugated iron roofs of the often brightly coloured houses, is an extraordinary church, named after Iceland’s 17th-century poet and hymn-writer, Hallgrímur Pétursson (1614–74).

It is curious how, in several European cities, there was one significant early 20th-century local architect who dominated the scene, designing major public buildings as well as churches in a variety of fashionable styles according to purpose – Kotěra in Prague, Horta in Brussels, Tengbom in Stockholm and Plečnik in Ljubljana. In Reykjavík, that role was taken by Guðjón Samúelsson, Iceland’s first and only State Architect, whose date of birth – 1887 – made him a contemporary of Le Corbusier (with whom he had nothing in common). An early commercial building by Guðjón in Reykjavík reflects the influence of Eliel Saarinen in Helsinki; Guðjón’s Lutheran church in Akureyri, Iceland’s second city, and the Roman Catholic church in the capital are both Gothic with art deco touches, and ‘deco’ is the only term suitable to describe his National Theatre while the main building of the University of Iceland is in a monumental classical manner.

But Guðjón’s masterpiece, the Hallgrímskirkja, is in a class and style of its own. The dramatic element is the landmark tower, which rises to a strange pyramidal summit, 73 metres above the ground (Fig. 1). This verticality is stressed by it being composed of polygonal shafts, deliberately reminiscent of volcanic basalt rock formations, and this treatment extends laterally into curving wings which enclose a forecourt – a space enhanced by the presence of a dramatic statue of Leif Erikson, the Viking who discovered America centuries before Columbus. The design dates from 1937 but construction only began in 1945 and it was not completed and consecrated until 1986 – 36 years after the death of its architect. The Hallgrímskirkja is therefore a rather late essay in that National Romanticism which affected many European nations earlier in the century. In this case the inspiration is clear: the Grundtvigs Kirke in Copenhagen (where Guðjón had trained), the famous Expressionist Gothic church of the 1920s designed by P.V. Jensen-Klint, which was also built in memory of a Lutheran pastor and hymn-writer and where the tall brick façade resembles the pipes of a giant organ.

The Hallgrímskirkja is famous and did not disappoint. I was not, however, expecting to find in the depressed capital of Iceland a vast, glittering new concert and conference hall right next to the old harbour. This, called Harpa, was proposed in 2002 by the state of Iceland and the city of Reykjavík and built by the East Harbour Company (Fig. 3). When the journalist A.A. Gill visited soon after the failure of Iceland’s banks in 2008, he wrote how the city was ‘littered with the detritus and shells of things that were once going so well and now aren’t going at all…. The biggest is a Babel-ish building site, palisaded by protective cranes, which was hoping to be a music hall, the Sydney Opera House of the far, far north…. There’s a toy model of what it is now unlikely to look like.’ But the resilience of the Icelanders is not to be underestimated: Harpa has been finished, even if not much, as yet, seems to be going on in it. And it is spectacular.

Externally, the building is a composition of irregular glazed masses, made distinctive by walls of sloping hexagons – volcanic symbolism again! – which are illumined so that, at night, flickering waves of different colours move and shimmer across the façades. This was the creation of the Danish-Icelandic artist Ólafur Elíasson. The building itself was designed by Henning Larsen Architects of Copenhagen, working with the local firm of Batteríið Architects. Although they provided a series of sensible, functional halls and a handsome main auditorium of traditional configuration, the public spaces are exercises in that fashionable irregular fractal geometry purveyed by international celebrity architects. But here, for once, this modish treatment has purpose: new, unexpected spaces open up as the visitor moves up and down the dramatic staircases and along the balconies. The principal foyer, which rises the whole height of the building to a reflecting sculptural ceiling, is a breathtaking space (Fig. 2). At an upper level a long staircase bridge, lined with alcoves for talking and, I trust, drinking, leaps the whole length of the space as it rises to an upper balcony with bar and restaurant.

Iceland was once oppressed by Denmark, but at Harpa this historic Nordic connection has resulted in a great and thrilling modern building.

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