Iceland review - 2016, Page 60

58 ICELAND REVIEW
music festival in November, you might
be forgiven for thinking you had arrived
at hipster central. At other times, it feels
more like Venice on a bad day with cruise
ship passengers flooding the city. But
overall, our new visitors make this city a
better place to live.
We should hope for more enlightened
developers, but that is more likely to hap-
pen in New York or in London, where
there is a longer history and stronger
traditions in that particular trade. We
can only hope that at some point they
will realize that hiring the best architects
and paying them well to do a good job
is part of their civic duty. We can only
hope that they will, like the developers
of the Seagram building, understand that
sometimes building less and providing a
public space around your project actually
increases its value. They are not invent-
ing this game; it’s all been done before.
But developers are not like you or me:
they are aggressive people who are will-
ing to take on a fight. They can make lots
of money, or they can go bust. At least
developers in Reykjavík are providing
much needed space in the center of town.
They are risking their money, causing
a nuisance, creating a stir, offending
people, fighting the planning authori-
ties, even upsetting the Prime Minister’s
aesthetic sensibilities. They are not con-
structing the most beautiful buildings,
but then most buildings in cities only
need to blend into the fabric of the city.
They don’t need to be outstanding. They
need to be fit for a purpose and even
the most controversial new buildings
become part of the city with time. In any
case, our tastes change; we change our
minds about things, about what kind of
a city we are building, about the kind of
architecture we want to see. The context
changes. A bad building may be put to
new use, and all of a sudden we accept it.
Cities are shaped by conflict, by special
interests, by money, and occasionally by
consensus and good taste. But mainly
there is conflict. I would have preferred
Jean Nouvel’s proposal for the new con-
cert hall in Reykjavík. Perhaps you dis-
agree with me. That’s fine. Perhaps you
feel, like many people in power at the
time, that Nouvel was making fun of us.
His proposal for a public building, hid-
OPINION
den inside a grassy hill with small houses
on top, suggested a people who had just
arrived in a city from our turf huts in the
country. But the point is that it’s fine to
disagree, it’s part of living together in a
city. Harpa serves its purpose, it func-
tions as intended, and it makes Reykjavík
a much better city.
REYKJAVÍK, OH REYKJAVÍK
I live on the top floor of a 1960s office
building in the center of Reykjavík.
Everyone except my wife thinks it is a
rather unlovely structure. But it does its
job. It’s a wonderful place to live, with
wide open spaces and a view over the
city. An architect friend, having admit-
tedly had a couple of glasses of red wine,
described it as Villa Savoye in the sky,
after Le Corbusier’s controversial mas-
terpiece in France. It is a reminder of
ambitious people in the sixties who had
a vision of Reykjavík as a modern city.
Across the street from me is a traditional
wooden house clad with corrugated iron
that houses the mayor’s family. On my
other side is a nondescript concrete pile
that nevertheless houses Snaps bistro,
which is always full of life. The area used
to have small grocery shops that disap-
peared when supermarkets came along in
the eighties. But slowly they are making
a return. The mayor’s basement has been
taken over by Frú Lauga, an organic
grocery shop and farmers market. In
a basement on the next corner, where
decades ago there used to be a bakery,
but which had been derelict for a long
time, an Icelandic professional basketball
player of Russian descent has teamed up
with friends to open a butcher’s and fish-
mongers. The buildings haven’t changed;
the people in the city have.
Buildings matter, but the function they
provide matters more, and the spac-
es in between those buildings matter
even more for life in the city. Whether
buildings are good, bad, or simply aver-
age—like most of them tend to be—they
become part of the fabric of the city.
I really admire buildings by my
favorite architects; David Chipperfield,
Annabelle Selldorf and Eric Parry. But I
would never want to live in a city where
they and their most talented colleagues
PUBLIC BUILDINGS
We keep having the same arguments
over public buildings. They are always
too expensive, and we can never agree
on where they should be put, but we do
need them. They are part of what makes
the city what it is. Harpa, the concert
hall, was massively more expensive than
originally planned, and when the bank-
ing system collapsed in 2008 it was less
than half built. We had a huge argument
about what to do, whether to tear it
down, or to leave it as it was as an eternal
reminder of the folly of a small nation
attempting an ambitious public building.
In the end we decided to use money that
could have been used on the health ser-
vice or education to complete what many
saw as a vanity project. But you know
what? When you sit in the auditorium
listening to the stupendous acoustics, you
forget about the money. The building is
not perfect, but it has a quality that never
existed in Iceland before. It transports
you to a place where you could not go
before.
CONFLICT AND RESOLUTION
It is in the nature of things to disagree
on buildings and on cities. Most projects
are controversial when they are proposed
and the city is shaped by many dif-
ferent interests. Property developers in
Reykjavík are accused of being motivated
only by the desire to make a quick profit,
trying to build as much as possible on
the plots they control, and lately building
hotels on every corner. That jibe is partly
true, but it’s also unfair. Developers are
easy targets. The fact is that Reykjavík
had almost no visitors for decades, and
very few decent hotels. There was a lot of
catching up to do. We are all ambivalent
about the steep increase in the number of
tourists, and it would be difficult for any
city to deal with a 30 percent increase in
visitor numbers year after year. But let’s
put that in context. Iceland will receive
1.65 million tourists this year. Oxford, a
city the size of Reykjavík, receives 7 mil-
lion tourists a year. We are coping pretty
well and the vibe of the city is chang-
ing, mostly for the better. If you visit
Reykjavík during the Iceland Airwaves