Reykjavík Grapevine - 14.07.2006, Síða 4

One of the most distinct and controversial
buildings in Iceland, the Reykjavík City
Hall surprised a nation when it was erected
in the early 1990s. Sindri Eldon met with
Steve Christer of Studio Granda to discuss
the impact of one of the city’s architectural
hallmarks.
/// In creating the City Hall, what was given
priority, function or design?
– When we took part in the design compe-
tition, we were very aware of how city halls
usually are. They’re very often imposing buil-
dings, with a big portico, and steps up to the
front of them. It’s usually a bit difficult to get
into them, and when you get to the front door
you feel very small, and that’s exactly what we
didn’t want to show here.
We wanted to show that Iceland is a very
open, a very democratic society, that anyone
can go in and get close to the politicians and
get close to the people that are ruling the city,
so that’s why you can enter the city hall from
three different directions on the street. You
can do that on the level, so you can be in a
wheelchair, or be physically handicapped in
any other way. It’s very easy to get in.
You can drive your car underneath it
and pop up into the building, so it’s actually
accessible from within, too, and you can see
into the building everywhere, so the people
working in there, they are very visible, and
they can see you, and especially the city
council chamber that’s displayed to the corner
pond. That is actually in a way thought that
it doesn’t have a wall on that side. The wall is
the town itself, the back wall of the chamber
is the town itself, so when you stand on the
pavement outside of there, you’re in the room.
In that way, we really wanted to build a part
of the city. Not any physical part, but part of
the way that...everybody in the city is the city.
The society of the city is enabled in the city
hall...did you get that?
/// Yes...yes...it made a surprising amount
of sense to me, actually. So...when city hall
was finished, what was the initial reaction to
how the building looked, and do you think
the attitude toward the building has chan-
ged over the years?
– Well, I think we should go back a little bit,
and think about when we won the competi-
tion, which is in ’87. We were very happy, we
were two very young architects in London, we
were only 27 years old. We had no experience,
we’d done a one-car garage before. We came
here, and everyone clapped and gave us a
bunch of f lowers and we got the commission.
Three months later, we were having death
threats, bomb threats, we had articles in the
newspaper saying how this was a disastrous
project, and that continued for over a year, in
fact. All through the four-and-a-half years
that we built the project, there was a lot of
public opposition to that building. In fact, I
think it was probably more public opposition,
and certainly the most fierce public opposition
that there has been against any building in
this country.
After that, the building opened, and in
three days we had 45,000 people through that
building. 45,000 people is at that time half the
population of Reykjavík. One-fifth of the po-
pulation of the country visited the building in
three days. They destroyed all the f loors, we
had to polish them again, and what happened
after that, we didn’t hear again negative voices
about the city hall. People said ‘I was never
happy with the location, but it’s a beautiful
building.’ A few people say they don’t like it, I
think they should, not everyone should say it’s
a nice building. On the whole, people come to
us and say that they’re happy about it.
/// The way I see it, I think you have failed if
you make something everyone likes.
– Absolutely. In fact, we’re worried how many
people like it...and of course you don’t believe
them when they say they like it. People are
polite. They want to be nice to you, and so
on. And I know myself, that there’s loads
of...failures in that building. When you’re as
young as we were when we designed it, you
have far, far too many ideas, so the building
has five to six hundred more ideas than it
needs, and you can see in the later work we do
that it’s gotten much simpler, much cleaner.
/// OK. If you could guide visitors through
the city hall yourself, what would you point
out to them, about the architecture? Maybe
these “failures”?
– Well, I think that what’s probably most
important about it, is that even though it
occupies a lakeside site, we have actually given
the lake back to the city by putting a pond on
the other side of it, on the town side, so it has
water on both sides so you still walk around
the pond, with the effect of viewing the buil-
ding in it. I think you should point people out
that it’s got a very good café that sells great
cakes, and they do a great macchiato.
I think most people notice the moss wall,
and that sort of changes depending on the
seasons, and I think that’s just great to see,
and so if you came at wintertime, you’d get a
very different experience than if you came in
the spring, and that’s in a way nature inhabi-
ting the building like people inhabit it, inside
of it.
I think you should see the materiality of
the building, and see how even though it’s
fourteen years old it actually looks as though
it was built two or three years ago, and that’s
because it’s been made with really, really
good materials, and fantastic craftsmen that
we have here. We have them to thank. The
concrete work is extraordinary, you have to go
to Japan to get as good concrete work as that.
/// The City Hall was your first large pro-
ject. After everything was finished and the
45,000 people had come and gone, was there
a sense of ‘what now’?
– Well, we were very lucky that my partner
was pregnant with our first child, so we had
something great to look forward to. The thing
that actually happened after we handed over
the key at the opening, and all those people
started coming in, is that we went to bed. We
were in bed for a week, we were ill. We had
actually worked for about ten hours a day, se-
ven days a week, for four-and-a-half years. We
were just...completely on our knees. Actually,
it was really good that we had this child,
because we took a year off and just dealt with
him, and talked about what we were going to
do next.
We’d just done a really big building,
by our standards. Everyone else was doing
bathroom interiors, and we do 10,000 square
metres. We build it, it gets done, every light
switch does what it’s supposed to do, and then
you have to think very carefully, where do you
go? You’re not going to do another city hall.
Do we give up architecture and run a video
store? What are you going to do? So, yeah, it
was quite a challenge.
/// You seem to gotten on the right track.
You’re very busy these days with several
buildings around here that are being built
around here by the firm.
– We’ve got a lot on our order books at the
moment. Unfortunately, because we’re so
small, we don’t do very much, and people have
to wait, but our clients have been very patient
with us. We’re very happy.
An Open House for Politics in Action
An interview with City Hall architect Steve Christer
by sindri eldon photo by gúndi
architecture