THE FACADE
Harpa’s multifaceted glass façades are the result of a unique collaboration between renowned artist Olafur Eliasson and Henning Larsen Architects. The design is based on a geometric principle, realized in two and three dimensions. surrounding colours – the city lights, ocean and glow of the sky. In this way, the expression of the facade changes according to the visual angle. With the continuously changing scenery, the building appears in an endless variation of colours.
Inspired by the crystallised basalt columns commonly found in Iceland, the southern facades create kaleidoscopic reflections of the city and the striking surrounding landscape. Made of a twelve-sided space-filler of glass and steel called the ’quasi brick’, the building appears as a play of colours, reflected in the more than 1,000 quasi bricks composing the southern facade. The remaining facades and the roof are made of sectional representations of this geometric system, resulting in two-dimensional flat facades of five and six-sided structural frames. Light and transparency are key elements of the building. The crystalline structure, created by the geometric figures of the facade, captures and reflects the light – promoting the dialogue between the building, city and surrounding landscape.
The building does not appear as a frozen setting but rather as an active, dynamic figure reflecting the weather, sun, city and changing parts of the day and the year. As the sun accentuates the details in light and shadow, the building alludes to the warm golden colours of glowing lava or to the ice blue glaciers of winter, providing the spectator with a sensuous feeling of nature’s continuous change. At night, LED lights integrated in the bricks illuminate the facades. Conceptually developed by Olafur Eliasson, the colour and light intensity of each brick can be individually controlled. In the foyer, shadows are projected onto the walls and floor, creating an almost crystalline space.
One of the main ideas has been to ‘dematerialise’ the building as a static entity and let it respond to the
30 |
| HARPA