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Farm Project in Iceland
I have been working on the rebuilding of a farm in the North-West of Iceland. I visited the site during my Christmas break at home and had long discussions with the owners, a couple that are by now old friends and clients after years of working together on various projects. They bought the farm four years ago from the retiring farmers and have been developing forestry (difficult task in Iceland with no trees almost) and other activities for their leasure as well as a new and a fulfilling life.
The first discussion was to try and patch up the old farm building that is built ca 1920, cladding it anew with timber. This is common in Iceland and not very intelligent since timber is not great cladding for concrete buldings in the wet and stormy climate.
But the house is actually quite beautiful in the landscape, even in its delapidated state like can be seen from my photos on the shortest day of last winter. In a meeting with an engineer it was clear on his behalf that it would be cheapest to just demolish the buildings and build completely new. This in a way shocked me somewhat because the engineer did not include any of the sentimental values that are embedded in the old structure, history, form etc, and only thought about the price over the counter of building materials and work. Neither did he consider the environmental issues of destroying something that has larger value and throwing away. A typical attitude I am sorry to say.
In the end we decided together to reuse the existing structure, fix and adapt to todays needs and users. I have spent some of my time on this task, doing detailing and discussing with builders and engineering firm (not the same as proposed to pull down), and now the project has started on site. We have decided to cut up some of the existing concrete, adapt the cowshed into a studio and adapt the manure store as a utility room for farm maintainance. We are also pulling down some corrugated sheds that rather damaged the overall picture. The buildings stand proudly on a crest with dramatic mountain ridge behind. Being in Africa it is strange to participate in the project, being excited while not being able to do other than using mail for decisions, dialogues and receiving photos and reports. Here are some images from this weekend and one of the complex as I see it when complete plus one image of detailing that I am enjoying so much to draw.
