Architecture Profile of the Month, Iceland
In liaison with Iceland’s powerful environment Inspired by his time studying in Spain, Orri Árnason, the founder of Zeppelin Arkitektar (Architects), seeks to combine the green beauty of Spanish cities with the resourcefulness of his Icelandic predecessors. By Signe Hansen
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Photos: Zeppelin Arkitektar
Founded in 1997, Zeppelin Architects has designed buildings for a wide variety of purposes, including a summer house, which was nominated for the Icelandic Architecture Prize by the late artist Birgir Andrésson who created a portrait (in words) in its interior. The summer house is located in Þingvellir, where the settlers founded the parliament in 930, Iceland’s most sacred place and now a national park. The area is part of a fissure zone running through Iceland, being situated on the tectonic plate boundaries of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Placed on the shore of the Þingvallavatn Lake the house was designed to make the most of the Icelandic land88
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Issue 162
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January 2024
scape’s greatest advantage – its amazing views - and to minimise the effect of its greatest challenge - its strong winds. “The challenge was that all the directions were wrong - the view was facing towards the wind, meaning that if we creatPerlan: This proposal by Orri Árnason sees Parlan, six old water tanks covered by a glass dome in Reykjavik, turned into a sparkling spa hotel.
ed a shelter, there would be no view. So, I had to twist and turn the building while also maintaining the strict regulations on size, which applied due to its location in a national park,” explains Árnason. The result is a beautifully simple building with three small modules connected at odd angles to create an inviting sheltered terrace for residents to sunbathe and enjoy the wonderful views of the adjacent lake. Moreover, large panorama win-