Harpa

Harpa was designed by the Copenhagen firm Henning Larsen Architects with the Icelandic office Batteríið and the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, as the cultural anchor of a large harbour redevelopment at Austurhöfn. Construction began in 2007 and stopped in 2008 when the Icelandic banking system collapsed, taking the developer with it; the government decided to fund the rest of the half-built hall, and for several years it was the only construction site in the country. That history is part of what the building means in Reykjavík. The façade is its argument: a steel framework clad in geometric glass panels of different colours, worked out with Eliasson from the basalt landscape of Iceland, which turns the whole seaward front into a changing screen of reflections off the harbour. The opening concert was on 4 May 2011, and Harpa won the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2013.