Iceland House

INTIMACY

This project begins with an uncommon form of intimacy, though one that reflects something real about contemporary life. The couple at its centre maintain active, autonomous lives largely apart from one another — she conducting research in Poland, he similarly engaged in Japan. The house is their common ground, the venue where their shared life is possible. Their respective presence within it is not incidental to the architecture; it is what completes it.

Rather than designing a house that memorializes their relationship — a collection of objects and mementos, a formalized nostalgia — the project takes a different approach. The house itself becomes the record, one that writes and rewrites itself continuously. Estrangement is used as a means of developing closeness: even when only one of them is there, the design keeps the other present. Degrees of proximity, the perception of the other's absence and anticipated return, an architecture capable of registering the personalities of its occupants — these become the terms of a house that reinvents itself around the people who inhabit it, and implicates itself in their behaviour.

The central inquiry is architecture made complete by the individual. Deliberately left open — not unresolved through failure, but through intention — this is an architecture that establishes the conditions for transformation. It is always in relation to a body in space, and equally to an intellect in culture. These two conditions must remain inextricably linked for the architecture to hold meaning.

PATTERN RECOGNITION

Discrepancies and aberrations function as a form of access — both physical and psychological. Symmetry-breaking is understood here as the introduction of information into an otherwise legible order: it is what makes the familiar strange enough to be noticed, and strange enough to be inhabited more fully. Recognition and disruption are in productive tension.

The construction of these spaces is therefore not interested in transcendence — in lifting the subject out of their context toward some abstracted spatial experience. Context travels with the individual: in knowledge, in language, in memory. But there are also external forces at play, the presence of others, histories embedded in place. The architecture works to locate the individual within all of this, rather than to efface them.

Three things follow from this:

1. The architecture is made deliberately incomplete.

2. Our perceptions as occupiers of a cultural artefact are by nature personal and relative, never absolute.

3. These two conditions work together to make the architecture whole — not in any fixed or final sense, but continuously, as the individual moves through and transforms it.

Not everything happens at the same rate of speed.

HOME

The house is built around a rigid outer shell, bent in upon itself and sheared sectionally, simultaneously expanding and contracting the interior volume. A series of wood arch ribs, spring-like in their behaviour, are stiffened by glass-reinforced plywood and cut basalt. A long two-storey bookshelf provides additional support along part of the interior. Where the shell opens, an all-glass structural surface closes it — as floor, wall, or ceiling, as required. Glass beams and sandwiched panels of glass and clear polycarbonate maintain the structural integrity of the shell while preserving the visual continuity between the two ends of the house, drawing them together like the ends of a bow.

Strung between the wood ribs — floor to ceiling, rib to adjacent rib — and concealed within the layered exterior wrap, curtains define all interior spaces. The house is, in this sense, a sediment of curtains. Layer upon layer, in varying densities, they establish the programmatic areas of the house: places to sing, to paint, to write, to sleep, to cook. Their beginnings and ends contribute to the definition of these zones. But unlike walls, curtains move. Running on a complex array of fixed tracks, they can be drawn open, built up into dense enclosures, or stored away entirely. The tracks are permanent; the spaces they produce are not.

Each curtain is designed to facilitate a range of experiences: acoustic and visual separation through varied opacity, access to media through projection surfaces or integrated electronics, connection to adjacent spaces through pleats and slits, and tensile structural support. Most significantly, the curtains respond to the inhabitants. As they are moved, drawn, and left in place, they accumulate a record of occupation — a spatial sketchpad of past experience.

When one partner is absent, the last fixed position of the curtains holds the memory of their presence. When the other arrives, that record is encountered and then remade. The space is articulated as anticipation — and then, in the living of it, as recollection. The imminent arrival of the other, the space they will find you in, the ability to relive a time spent together: the house becomes a reservoir of experience, a form of knowledge that is also a form of pleasure.

SITE

The house is situated north of Reykjavik, near Litlibotn, in a three-thousand-year-old lava field at the mouth of a fjord. Beyond an expanse of open tundra, a crenelated surface of basalt — thick with silver-blue-green moss — extends toward the eastern horizon. Snow covers the ground for a significant portion of the year, transforming the textured landscape into a softer, white version of itself. This surface is further articulated by narrow, deep crevices, some of which emit columns of steam from geothermal springs below. While sudden shifts in temperature or pH are possible, these springs are sufficiently reliable to serve as a clean, continuous power source for the house. The building straddles one such crevice, drawing on its energy for basic systems and year-round use of a pool.

Partially elevated, partially embedded in the basalt, the house exploits a sectional rift in the rock to establish complementary but diametrically opposed views — of the landscape, and of itself. The arctic air distorts the perception of distance: depth flattens, proximity is misread, and a new understanding of near and far must be learned. This perceptual condition extends the interior logic of the curtains into the landscape itself. The curtain find their extension into the landscape during moments of aurora borealis.

Iceland was not a neutral choice. Beyond its personal significance to both clients and architect, it offers a decisive counterpoint to the separate working lives that define this couple's existence — a place held in common, returned to from opposite directions. It is also a country of particular qualities: among the highest standards of living in the world, near-universal literacy, no standing military, and a geographic position that makes it a natural waypoint between the research destinations that structure the clients' professional lives.