Bound

Njálsgata, midtown Reykjavík

( Note: this is my 703rd post, so if you're a new visitor, be sure to follow the 'Older Posts' link at the bottom right side of this page. Or you can use the archives feature down at the bottom as well. I've just started collapsing older posts, so for full articles, hit the 'Read more' links . In addition, I reference my older posts quite a bit, and try to find the most relevant and unique external info sources, so let the links in my articles take you even further into the adventure that is Iceland : )

Well well, best laid plans, etc...

We haven't yet made it to lands east, as per my last post. Take a good look at this slightly awkward photo and you'll see that a portion of our house is bound to our tree, and that the roof and gutter are in bad shape. Gale-force winds in mid-March happened to be blowing at exactly the right angle to pry their surreptitious fingers under the corrugated iron and literally make red metal wings out of it, seeming to flap in some desperate take-off attempt, held down only by decades-old nails set in the much older wood frame. Luckily,
a neighbor saw it happening and called Björgunasrveit Ársæll, the local search and rescue squad, and they came super promptly to bind it down, though there was definitely enough for them to do that morning! (there are 59 photos in the series I just linked to, so be sure to click through them all ; )

Not that the roof is the only reason I'm calling off any big moves right now. If you look even closer still at my picture you can see that the dressing (siding?) is cracked and old, and during the process of trying to sell my apartment (which is through the opened door in the pic) it came to light that at least one other owner of the property had been sorely neglecting his apartment, and renting it out as an absentee landlord. Suffice to say that ýmislegt kom í ljós ('miscellaneous things came to light') that directly affected the infrastructure of our building, and thus shared cost for repairs. I had buyers who were willing to take my place as-is, but the haggling process was wearing me down, and that tendency of people to pick at a thing until they find the flaw they're looking for (and possibly creating that very flaw in the process, in this case visualizing years down the road when this or this or that issue would eventually come up, and trying to bargain for a discount based on that) just took the shine off of the whole plan in general.

It's an old house. As a matter of fact it's 20 years older than any of us thought, and thus has automatic Protected Status with the Minjastofnun (The Cultural Heritage Society of Iceland.) When I discovered that, I decided to stay put for the while and invest in helping to preserve our old house, much loved but sorely in need of maintenance to stand the tests of time.

I wrote this one evening while contemplating the chaos of selling. It's really what made me decide to put big moves to other towns on the back burner, and focus my attention on what I've got right now:

I love the house we live in. I own (with the bank) twenty five percent of the house, built in 1905 and located on lot number 34. We have a functional, well-organized, clean and sunny backyard (on good weather days that is, though all weather is interesting in its own right) and the tallest tree on the block, proudly. Our house is dressed in crushed sea shells, a millennia worth of spittle from the strange mouths of mollusks from far away, where the Gulf Stream begins. Who knows from where these clams and such came, or from what era. Regardless, they, in crushed form collected from semi-local beaches, have been, handful by handful cast fast onto a fine but hearty layer of dressing cement. It took skill and days, and is sadly now cracked in many places. The shells themselves retain their strength, but their size allows for the cement to break apart at stress points, and form long, dark, thin ribbons on the facade of the house with no real damage to the beach stuff itself. So sadly, though the originators of the idea had a brilliant theory in concept, in practice the medium in which the everlasting (or at least waterproof) shells were set was simply not strong enough to stand the tests of time: wind, wetness, wild fluctuations in temperature, and earthquakes. Who first thought of this idea? And would the supposed theory have matured into well-respected fact if the right setting medium had  been used to attach all that history to the house in the first place?

It's just a house. Just there, like all the other gazillion I've never been in. Just a house, but who built it, and how has it changed in 110 years? Who lived here, who loved, and if anyone, who was born or died? A basic house, even though dressed with the spit of a million mollusks made into shells over spans of time. But as many have said before me, a house is a story, and that story can keep growing and evolving in many beautiful ways. Or it can fester into hatred and rot. Ill will, or worse, apathy can ruin the saga of a space, especially those not built by stone, but more absorbent stuff. Like a sponge, the timber of our houses absorbs the energy radiating from its occupants, sometimes toxic. One unloved space, or one space that though loved isn't within the means of the inhabitants to maintain, decays in spirit. Renters resent that an owner doesn't come to fix a leak, buy replacement parts, repay them for new paint or other small or significant acts of repair. So though loved, the space absorbs the tenants' frustration, and saddens even further. A house needs love, and effort, to survive. 

In warmer regions, houses stand empty in the many thousands, covered in vines and rogue blooms that grasp at the chance to grow closer to the light with their help. The deep, deep desire to feed more and more purely, unhindered by the shadows of other plants, is the only fact, the only reality. Up, and reaching new shoots up, the vines and growth break down their helpful scaffold, adding damp and a trillion, trillion-fold minuscule green fingers into the the wood or neglected cement, finding the holes bored by beetles, the cracks and weak spots in the body of their host. They take down what gives them life, or at least gets them closer to their photon source: our Sun. The sheer weight of the floras' abundance topples the once-homes of someones. Without maintenance and care, in only a few short years plants (or in colder climes just weather itself) can reduce a once-loved home back into the elements from which it came. 

(Note: I  found out from the Minjastofnun that the idea of dressing buildings like ours came into fashion in the 30's as a way to make timber houses look like cement ones. In fact, my unit in our building is the only original part of the house: the other four apartments were added on over the past century, and when a cement addition was put into place, the corrugated iron was taken off and the dressing/siding put up instead. It's pretty much agreed today that it was not a good idea as the timber structure can't breathe as well as it can with corrugated iron, and had a tendency towards rot. When we replace the dressing/siding we'll find out how much that affects us : / Oh, and I was informed that, yes, the sea shell coating is rare, but almost impossible to replace because all of the beaches here are protected. 

If you're interested in the history of my part of old-town Reykjavík (the Njálsgata area) here's a report detailing each house in a four-block radius. It's in Icelandic, but it's got some pictures too : ) And here's the city website where you can see all of the architectural plans for local buildings. The link goes directly to my property.)

There's a bit of an issue with the Comments feature, as in it doesn't show as an option on this main page. If you'd like to leave  acomment on an individual post, just click on the title of the post and go from there. Or you can write to me at icelandeyes at gmail dot com, and/or you can visit my fb page. I don't post a lot of fluff there, but if I find something interesting or unique, that's probably where I'll share it : ) 

Seyðisfjörður

Classic Iceland Eyes from July 2005. Back then I wrote:

This church in Seyðisfjörður is actually called the Blue Church, or Bláa kirkja. Like a lot of the buildings here it's turn-of-the century, when fishing money poured into the eastern fjords, turning villages into important towns. Seyðisfjörður, nestled as it is between protective mountains on either side, is especially charming, and even the fog that creeps in in broad daylight adds a lovely mystique. The ferry Norræna docks here every week in the summer months, taking passengers to and from the Faroe and Shetland Islands and Norway. Unfortunately, last week a man was busted for trying to smuggle some poundage of meth into the country in his car, an all too common occurance on the ferry, but that ugliness simply cannot tarnish the beauty of this sweet spot.

Hopefully the drug smuggling has died down in the past seven years, because the stunning beauty of this side of our lovely island certainly hasn't. The shot below from a family reunion is a wonderful example, with it's gorgeous view due east, down the fjörð and out to the open Arctic seas beyond.

Have you tried Dynamic Viewing yet? Five new views in all. Use the blue tab at the top of the view page to check them all out : )

News

More macro loveliness from the heart of Reykjavik, this time of a flower medley in my parent's front yard ~.~

While cruising the interwebs today I ran across a link from the Bookworm Bookshop in Beijing highlighting the City of Reykjavik's first Reading Festival in October 2012, Sleipnir and the Joy of Reading. Reykjavik is a UNESCO City of Literature, which will be no surprise to my more literary readers (góðan daginn, Professor Batty!)

In other news, I promised to keep us all informed about the winner of the competition for the redesign of Ingólfstorg. They are the ASK architectural firm, and here is their winning design. Even though some people are righteously furious over everything that smacks of change, anything is better than the bad chi feng shui state of things in that downtown square. The city of Rvk has made a recent valiant attempt to draw more summertime life there, but when I drove past yesterday evening there were exactly 8 well-known town drunks (who usually hang out at Austurvellir) taking advantage of the new lounge chairs, two bikers, and lone skater petulantly sliding a measly wooden box. I'm beginning to think ancient Indian burial ground for that particular plot of land...

So though I try my best not to sleb gawk, ok, ok, yes Tom and Katie came into Valentína's ice cream store on the last official day of their pre-divorce papers marriage.  And as it seems that the final photo of them holding hands EVER displays the very same double vanilla latte that Katie politely ordered from Kristjána (the cute girl in the headband in the back row of this photo) while bodyguards waited outside and Tom flashed her his winning grin, I thought I'd go ahead and mention it.

Speaking of visitors, I mentioned cruise ships in the last post. The following photos are from June 18th, when four huge luxury liners docked here and spewed forth 10,000 curious humans which, combined with fold arriving by air, meant the highest number of visitors Iceland has ever had in one day.

One of the ships was the Costa Pacifica, sister ship to the ill-fated Costa Concordia (this last link is to a very compelling article in Vanity Fair about her last night afloat.)

These pics are however of the German AIDAmar, a 252-meter long Sphinx-class cruise ship with 1096 cabins and adorned with a smile, unlike her pensive residents in these shots, who I'm sure were just unwinding from a long day of Golden Circling and postcard buying and such. It seems that tourism is booming here on the Lava Rock, and with more arrivals and departures from Keflavik International than ever, as well as the increase in cruise liners, it seems things won't be settling back into any kind of "isolated republic in the North Atlantic" any time soon.

Have you tried Dynamic Viewing yet? Five new views in all. Use the blue tab at the top of the view page to check them all out : )

Property

Another weird wonder we found just around the corner from our house, this gutted building at Frakkastígur 16, just below Kaffismiðja Íslands and the corner shop Drekinn and where the music and instruments store Rín* lived for forty years before moving to Brautarholt in 2004, has become a canvas for street artists while its future is being decided. You can play around with this interactive map of Reykjavik to find the streets mentioned in this post...

I found some interesting info on this location: the property just below it takes an L-shaped turn up to Njálsgata, and is where the Ölgerðin Egill Skallagrímson brewery used to be. I remember very well being able to smell the almost too-rich aroma of a new batch of Malt Extrakt being brewed there before they moved out to Grjótháls. In the corner crook created by the fairly new apartment complex built on the site of the old brewery (btw, the 1100 square meter site was bought by the City for a sweet 37 million krónur back in 2000...good god how times have changed! That amount might buy you an average three bedroom apartment a tenth that size today) sits the Drekinn house built in 1905, a blue cement building from 1943, and this now-rundown structure. It seems its owners have requested permission to tear down at least six times since 2006, though it looks like the local building preservation society has had a hand in making sure that didn't happen, and there seems to have been a co-owner of the lot that also refused to agree on demolition. Ultimately, I'm sure it was the bank crash that set any grand real estate intentions on ear, seeing as the last specific mention I could find was an August 2008 photo report of abandoned houses in the midtown area by the Prevention Department of the Capital District Fire and Rescue Service, when there was still enough money floating around to bitch and squabble over who would get what share of the prosperity pie. Sigh.

The picture below is one I took last fall of some nice visitors who stopped to snap a classic shot of the Drekinn shop.

And here below? Just some nuns, and just for fun : )

*Some of the links in this post are in Icelandic...sorry I wasn't able to find anything in English with the same info, but now you've got more material to practice your language learning with! 

2000 years of Architecture with € Notes

When I'm taking my groups of Americans around Europe (Click here if you haven't read my evangelical enthusiasm for this part time job of mine!) one of the things I love to do is explain 2000 years of European architecture, art, history, politics and religion in 15 minutes... with the aid of Euro bank notes.  Okay, that might be overstating it a *bit* but if you want a very rough and ready overview, read on!

The Whole Spread

So I love Euro banknotes (and coins, but that's a whole other story) and wonder how many people know what they depict.  I don't want my students just wandering round saying "wow, everything's so old" - I want them looking at buildings and realising that styles don't exist in a vacuum.  They're intricately linked to what is going on in Europe at the time.

5 EURO CLASSICAL

Let's kick off with the 5 Euro.  The banknotes always depict an archway or window on one side, and a bridge on the other.  The structures are representative - they don't show a particular national building.  That is reserved for each country's own coins if they wish.  So what's the oldest still existing architectural style of building in Europe?  We need to head down south for it - it's of course the architecture of Greece and Rome. 

Classical Architecture

Look at the design: it's a familiar "classical" archway.  On the back we have something that looks a lot like a Roman viaduct.  We're obviously talking about broadly 2000 years ago and many of these buildings are now ruins, and are can be found located in southern Europe.  We have wonders like the Colosseum in Rome; the Arena of Nîmes; the peerless Acropolis in Athens.  There are of course however classical buildings and ruins in Northern Europe too - although the Romans did not penetrate much north of the Danube or east of the Rhine.

10 EURO ROMANESQUE

Of course "Antiquity" ends.  The marauding Germanic tribes descend on Rome and after several sackings put an end to the dying empire in 476.  There follows a period known as the Dark Ages (*cue bad jokes about people bumping into each other with candles*)  Nothing much is built, there's not a great deal of surviving culture as people wander to and fro across the continent, mingling and settling in new places.

Then, broadly around 800 or so we have a new style of architecture.  Except it's not particularly original: it's a simpler, less grand form of building than the Romans did.  It looks vaguely similar though, and for this reason we call it Romanesque architecture.  We can see it on the 10 Euro note.  The lack of complexity of the style is as a direct result of the political situation in Europe; we're coming out a period of intense turmoil and even whilst these buildings are being constructed there are still invasions from the North from the Vikings.

Romanesque Architecture

The arch looks familiar, no?  There's just one thing to note: there are semi-circular round arches, often one inside another.  There isn't too much Romanesque architecture around: you can find the odd church dotted here and there.  They tend to be quite small and basic, with massive heavy walls, small windows and they are fairly simple in style.  They are therefore quite easy to spot where they've survived: Lisbon Cathedral is a great example of a very large one in fact.  In Britain Romanesque architecture is normally called "Norman" whereas everywhere else it is "Romanesque".


20 EURO GOTHIC

NOW we're talking though.  A clever Frenchman, Abbot Suger (also known as "Sugar", but only to his closest friends) became the chief patron and adopter of a brand new style of architecture in the 12th century.  This is "Gothic" architecture, the great style of the so-called Middle Ages which broadly last until around 1500.  It is represented on the 20 Euro note.

Gothic Architecture

For Gothic Architecture, think tall and pointy.  It's mainly seen in churches: we are building upwards to the Glory of God.  A brilliant new invention, flying buttresses, allow the roof to be supported without the massive heavy walls of Romanesque structures.  Instead we can put in wider aisles, and large windows often filled with beautiful stained glass.  Gargoyles often complete the picture.

There are splendid Gothic churches and cathedrals across Europe.  Think of Salisbury Cathedral in England, Cologne Cathedral in Germany, or the breath-taking Cathedral at Chartres with its intense blue windows.  Perhaps the most spectacular of the lot is Notre Dame in Paris with its outrageous flying buttresses.  Many of these churches take upwards of 150 years to complete: one end is one variety of Gothic, and by the time you get to the other end the particular style of Gothic has changed.  St Vitus cathedral in Prague took an amazing 600 years to complete (they had a bit of an extended Staropramen/Becherovka break in the middle, it must be admitted)

50 EURO RENAISSANCE

When we hit 1500 we run into the two big R's.  Actually the first R started quite a lot earlier than that in Italy: it's the Renaissance.  It takes quite a long time, however, to reach the other parts of Europe.  Renaissance of course means "rebirth" - the people of the time begin dismissing the "blind belief" of the Middle Ages and look instead to rational explanations and science to try to work out how the universe works.

These guys admire the thought, art and architecture of the Classical Age.  They actually coin the term "Middle Ages" as a derogatory way of referring to the bit between the two periods of civilisation: Antiquity and Now (i.e. the 1500s).  The archetypal Renaissance Man is Leonardo da Vinci: a painter, sculptor, mathematician, scientist, inventor and writer.  Bet he was a right annoying sod to have as a dinner party guest.

Renaissance Architecture

Look at the 50 Euro note.  Does the style look familiar?  Yes, this is becoming a bit dull. It reminds us, not surprisingly, of the architecture of Greece, and even more particularly, Rome.  It's actually an absolutely conscious copying of the Classical style, with an emphasis on symmetry, geometry, proportion and a direct copying of the classical order of columns for example.  THE Renaissance city in Europe is Florence, but this architecture can be found all across the continent.  It takes until the mid 1600s to reach somewhere like Turku in Finland, by which time it has pretty much finished in Italy.

How do we recognise a Renaissance building?  Well, the columns are a give away, as is the symmetry and lack of fanciful decoration that Gothic buildings tend to have.  If it looks vaguely Roman in style but is in really good shape, chances are it's from the Renaissance.  It's had less time to become a ruin.

100 EURO BAROQUE

How about the second R then?  This is the Reformation, which kicks off with a vengeance (after some earlier mumblings) with Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses - complaints - about the Roman Catholic Church to a pretty insignificant church door in Wittenberg in northern Germany.  An invention by another German, Guttenberg, makes this unimportant event a revolution: the moveable printing press means the ideas about reforming the Church spread across Europe like wildfire.

What's this got to do with architecture?  Well not much, initially.  Protestant Churches are stripped of their finery - the emphasis is on the word of God - Luther has translated the Bible for the first time into German and people can hear and understand themselves what the book has to say.  The pulpit is the important place in a Protestant church - let's whitewash all over the colourful Gothic paintings and strip the altars of their gold.  The important thing to do is listen, not be distracted.

Baroque Architecture

Broadly much of Northern Europe has become Protestant: the movement has been very successful.  The South remains mainly Catholic.  Where the Protestants have swung to simplicity, the Catholics now go exactly the opposite way.  Let's show people what Heaven on Earth can look like.  Let's decorate our churches fancifully, with gold, with glitz!  We demand angels, beautiful paintings, magnificent altars.  This is the Counter-Reformation - and when the Catholic German Emperor becomes involves this becomes the Empire Strikes Back (is there no end to my bad jokes?)

This new style of architecture is Baroque.  It's bold, it's bling and it's on the €100 bank note. It's not just about a style of building either; we're talking a feast for the senses.  When you enter a Baroque church you will SEE the beauty; you will HEAR the new Baroque music; you will SMELL the incense.  It's a feast for the senses.  It is taking you out of your miserable hard mortal life and showing you what promises the Church can offer you - if you remain with the faith.  There will be a huge dome towering above you in a Baroque church: the circular form is typical of the style.

Baroque architecture is intimately linked to the Catholic faith, so you will find much of it in Italy, Austria, Southern Germany, France, Spain - and it's not just Church architecture - palaces are decorated in the same heavy, ornate style.  We don't see quite so much of it in Britain.  St Paul's Cathedral is our best example: and it apparently was kept under scaffolding until the end, because the shock of seeing such a Catholic structure in London caused a scandal.  Its highpoint is during the 1600s.  Castle Howard in Yorkshire is a splendid non-religious example of the style.  Late Baroque is called "Rococo" and it lasts through into the 1700s.  It's getting even more silly and gaudy by this stage.

200 EURO ART NOUVEAU

The 19th century, or Victorian Age, is pretty pants for new architectural styles.  I guess people are too busy building up either their overseas or continental empires (countries such as Spain and Portugal have already been busy exporting Baroque architecture to the New World with the help of the Jesuits).  They are also rapidly industrialising and society is changing.  In Europe we have no new proper styles of architecture throughout this period - instead we have "Historicism".

A drive around central Vienna is a perfect example of what is being built in the Historic Style.  We have a neo-Gothic town hall - the idea is that the middle class citizens of the Low Countries had a great deal of autonomy in the Middle Ages.  It's therefore a good thing to copy this style to show this isn't about the aristocracy or royalty ruling.  It looks just like a building from 1300: but it's over 500 years later.  It's "new-Gothic" (just like our own Houses of Parliament in London).  We see the Assisi Kirche: a massive neo-Romanesque structure, built in 1898, in a style that's been dead for 700 years.   The Austrian parliament building looks like a Greek temple: Athena stands with her back to it: it is pure neo-Classical: a direct copy of a style 2000 years old.  We also have neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque mansions, hotels and public buildings dotted around the Ring.

Art Nouveau Architecture

For crying out loud, no wonder people get bored with this crap.  We've seen it all before, right?  It's not actually an architectural style - it's just copying old stuff - so we're definitely not going to give it its own bank note.  We need something new, different.  In Vienna a group of artists (Klimt foremost amongst them) "secede" - they object so strongly to the historicism around them that they form their own breakaway movement.  A style of architecture develops that is playful and inspired by nature.  Plants and flowers are often used to decorate these new building facades, as are curved lines.

It's more than just a style of architecture: it's a philosophy, an art - a reaction against the stodge.  It has its heyday from 1890 to 1910.  There are beautiful, curious, wonderful Art Nouveau (literally "new art") buildings all over Europe.  In Britain some wonderful examples are found in Glasgow.  There are also some great art nouveau touches inside Liberty's in London.

500 EURO MODERN ARCHITECTURE

We pass on through Art Deco in the 1920s and 1930s (a more mathematical, geometric style of design and architecture that is not shown on the notes) and on to the architecture of today.  We are talking glass and steel.  Whether this is a uniform style or not is a good question, but the 500 Euro note is a serious bit of kit.  It's a massive note, designed in particular for Germans, who eschew credit cards and cheques.  They like to pay in cash, even for something like a car.  If you buy a £20,000 car in England you'd need 400 x £50 notes.  The same €23,000 car in Germany could be bought with just 46 of these big pink whoppers.  On the French Autoroutes they have signs warning no €200 or €500 are accepted at toll booths: not in French or English, but only in German!

Modern Architecture

There's not too much to be said about the style of the architecture other than there are, in my opinion, some absolutely superb beautiful examples of it (I *love* the Gherkin in London) and I'd quite happily knock down the Shard before they stick the last piece of North Korean lookalike glass on it (yes, Google Image Search Pyongyang and it's THERE).  They say you should give all architecture a generation before you judge it - so I'm penciling in 2030 before I hire a crane and a wrecking-ball.

Quite a Journey

But there we are.  It's been quite a journey to go from the Colosseum to the Shard, but I hope you've hung in there.  As I started out saying, architecture does not ever exist in a void - it's reflective of what's going on in politics, religion, art, society at the time.  I'm no expert, but I love looking at buildings, trying to understand more about them, and I love the fact that a prop such as Euro notes can be so handy in reminding us of the story.

I hope you've enjoyed reading as much as I've enjoyed writing this!  Pictures of some of the buildings I've referred to can be found below.

Roman Arena, Nimes (€5 Classical)

Lisbon Cathedral (€10 Romanesque)

Notre Dame Cathedral Paris (€20 Gothic)

Hospital of Innocents, Florence (€50 Renaissance)

Castle Howard, Yorkshire (€100 Baroque)

Parliament Building, Vienna (Neo-Classical)

Apartment Blocks, Vienna (€200 Art Nouveau)

Swiss Re, London: the Gherkin (€500 Modern)

Urban Horse

Land in the greater Reykjavik area that was once reserved for horses, their stables, training rings and trails has slowly but surely been overtaken by housing developments and businesses. This stable resident is living her final winter at one of the last urban equestrian holdouts, a neighborhood of a hundred or so stalls now located just above the Smáralind shopping center. Not so long ago this site was on the very outskirts of the populated urban center. Now you can see Iceland's tallest building peeking from between the mare's ears.

The horses seem used to the constant heavy traffic on the highway just next to their paddock, but it's a sure thing that they'll not miss it when relocated to their new homes on the outer fringes of the Capital area. Of course there's always the question of how long it takes the ever-expanding city to encroach on those new lodgings as well.

Ruin

Every city has it's eyesores. Unfortunately, this one is located on our main strip Laugavegur, for everyone to see over and over again. We've watched the puddle in the pit fill, freeze, thaw, snow over, thaw again and refreeze, etc. Aside from that being a comment on the fickle weather over here, that means this lot has lay bare for many months now. Many months. And this is not midtown Reykjavik's only unfinished architectural business...

Commentary aside, I find this scene attractive for its rawness, for exposing the inner workings of a city block like some kind of splayed open biology dissection specimen. I wonder about the soot stain on the white building at the back, and about the block-letter graffiti on the brick garage. I applaude the person who decided to paint the face of the low-lying storage building a deep red with green trim, even though it was almost completely hidden from view before the house that filled this hole was torn down. I love the colors that contrast shockingly with the rubble and I like that we can see down to the bedrock and feel assured that the heart of Reykjavik is built on solid rock. I won't miss this raw scene when it's gone, but while it's here we might as well try to appreciate it.

Inside Sómastaðir