Day 4 Part 1 - En route to Skaftafell

[I have a short disclaimer before beginning this post. As you may have noticed by now, I have not been posting every day, but I am recording each day in sequence. So, I might post a few days at once, because I am unable for some reason to make a post that day. When I use the word "today" I mean the day that is being talked about, not the day that blogspot.com tells you it was posted. Hopefully no one is confused!]

Today we left Vik and headed for Skaftafell, at the base of the largest glacier in Iceland, called Vatnajökull (meaning "Glacier of Lakes"). On the way we made a stop at Núpsstaður, a farm in the Icelandic countryside. It's famous for its church, parts of which date back to the 17th century, and its sod-roof buildings.

I made some sketches of the buildings and their interiors, trying to compose their roof construction and making note of interior details.

The roof is surprisingly complex in terms of the forces involved. From my observations, it appeared that the the roof itself is made of wood beams, overlapping thin slate stone and straw, sod and grass. The roof is supported by beams that have been cut to overlap each other and sit on top of the column. The sheer mass of it all keeps the system in place and is built to last any weather condition. But the materials are easily accessible and it seems like the most effort was put into hewing the wood beams and columns.

The church was fascinating as a social building. Simply put, it is tiny. It was obviously built for the scale of the farm and the farm always stayed the same size.

The church is the sod-roofed building with the peaked roof behind the stone wall. I included all of the background and foreground information for scale. It is a tiny building!

This was assembled from two images, and one of them was blurry. I also forgot to put a person in the shot for scale, so here's my two interior elevation sketches of the inside:

From the outside, the peak of the roof is straight, but you see when you get inside that the front part of the church uses some of the roof space for storage. Then the building opens a bit and the full roof height is used. It's a humbling space.

We left the farm and continued on to Skaftafell. We stopped once more at a monument to the 1996 eruption of the volcano Katla which flooded the surrounding countryside with melted glacial water at a peak rate of  two million cubic feet per second. The floodwaters also famously tore a bridge out of its holdings, twisting metal and carrying it kilometers downstream in some cases. The monument is a piece of that bridge. It's really heavy!

I'll end the post here for now, since lots more happened when we arrived at Skaftafell, so I will finish up with Day 4 later. Thanks for reading!

Day 3 Part 2 - Vík í Mýrdal

Much of inhabited Iceland is small villages and towns that dot the landscape around Highway 1. Vík í Mýrdal (or Vik for short) is one of these towns.

I took a walk around town with after dinner with Lindsay and Keith. The town was quiet, since all of its members were gathered at a multipurpose space for some meeting. The houses are all cute and European, and I would have liked to see their interiors. 

A great surprise awaited me when I looked inside a small time-worn warehouse. Using a block of wood to boost my height, I pulled my face up to the window pane, peered inside through the gloom and saw this:

The ship looked to be over one hundred years old. The hotel across the street from the building declared itself to be built in 1832, so I would believe the ship to be from around that time.

The church sits on the highest hill of the town, overlooking the landscape. Even higher than the church sits the graveyard. I noticed the more recent graves were covered with sod. A short walk further revealed a patch of grass with lines of dirt showing that were about two feet wide where the villagers pulled up the grass and applied it as sod to the graves. Is that how it's done in the United States? Most people get sod from Home Depot, so this was unusual for me to see.

We were lucky enough to come upon the foundation of a house under construction. I snapped a few photos of the cement floor slab (no basement), with particular interest in the piping. Nothing was labeled, and even if it was it would've been in Icelandic. We tried to identify areas of the room by the piping, but we couldn't even get as far as identifying what piping was what. Here's a image to give you a sense of what was going on.

That will give you something to think about until my next post!

Day 3 - Þingvellir and Vik

Today we left the comforts of Reykjavik and began our three-day tour of natural Iceland. We traveled via Highway 1, Iceland's first highway. We began at Þingvellir (pronounced Thingvellir), the original meeting place of the vikings, also believed to be the first Parliament. 

Þingvellir is a giant rift in the rock surface where the North American and European tectonic plates meet. 

The vikings would meet on the grass in between these two giant stone walls. The acoustic properties of the stone is such that the sound echoes and a single voice can be heard a great distance by many people. 

On the other side of the rift, an expansive valley spread beyond, far into the distance. Across the river is the summer home of the Icelandic Prime Minister (the five-peaked house in the image below). Although we weren't allowed inside, we were able to walk right up to the door and all around the grounds, most likely because the Prime Minister wasn't in residence. There was hardly any security to speak of, in spite of the fact that the entire area is an important Icelandic and Scandinavian heritage site. We were able to walk around quite liberally, which was a refreshing change from the often stifling controls experienced at heritage sites in America.

Our challenge as students was to draw a section of the landscape, just by looking at what we see. I did some sketches, not entirely willing to commit to a single image. By figuring out proportions of heights, I drew more accurately.

I also tried out my watercolors (my secondary medium) today. I painted part of the valley with the Prime Minister's summer home and the church, the river in front and the mountains beyond.

After Þingvellir, we headed for Vik, our destination for the evening. On the way, we stopped at an enormous waterfall (whose name escapes me). It was remarkably beautiful in its sheer size. The thundering water and enveloping mist spray overwhelms the senses and feels otherworldly. The water flows over rocks and cliffs that change direction, causing the river to wind in a particularly intriguing way. The river continues between two grass and moss-covered clifs.

Much about rural Iceland screams Lord of the Rings. The landscape here is a bit harsher, but I can imagine this place inspiring a similarly epic viking adventure tale. It's no surprise that the word "saga" derives from Iceland.

As we headed to our final destination for the evening, we drove through an ash cloud remnant from the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull. At first just a minor inconvenience, like a light fog, our visibility slowly wore away to almost nothing. Staring out the window at this:

and then, finally, nothing at all, I understood that although the volcano may have finished erupting, Iceland still experienced reminders of its harshness and brutality. We drove through the cloud with all of the bus' ventilation ports closed, rendering the air conditioning unusable and inspiring more respect for those Icelanders who endure the hardship.

Finally, we broke through the ash cloud and arrived in Vik, at the base of the volcano Katla. Our hotel was still under construction and the smell of fresh-cut wood pervaded the interior. Just a short walk across the street was a black sand beach. I had never seen one before in my life. I've been to many beaches, and this one was no different.  The water, the sand, the breeze from the ocean, organic debris on the sand, these were all things I knew to be significant of beaches.  But the sand itself was jet-black, and this simple difference caused me to question the validity of my surroundings.

After dinner, a few of us took a walk around the town with some curious discoveries. But, I will have to elaborate later. Bye for now!

Day 2 - Reykjavik

We began the day with a trip to Reykjavik City Hall. Designed in 1987 by Studio Granada, it sits at the edge of Tjörnin Lake. Although, "sits on" is more appropriate, since half of the building sits in the water of the lake, and the main entrance of the building is flanked by a large reflecting pool.

(Notice the people walking "into" the pool?)

We did some sketching in the interior. I found a pair of stairs flanking an elevator. The treads were lit by recessed lighting in cut in the rise. The dark stone of the steps contrasted strongly with both the lighting and the crisp white walls. A landing at the halfway point contained a door which looked like it had been added on at a later time for enhanced security purposes. However, the door is glass and doesn't entirely seal up the path. I found the wood railing piece, identical to those found on the railing of the walkway across the lake (above) to be a particularly nice feature. 

Our next stop was our hard-hat tour of the Reykjavik Concert and Conference Centre (called "Harpa" by the locals) by Henning Larsen.  We received our tour from Ósbjørn Jacobsen, one of the lead architects of the building. The building is at least halfway completed, but there is a solid year's worth of work still left.

The facade was designed by Olafur Eliasson and derives from the famous basalt rock formations found in the volcanic areas. It has the fluidity of form and precision of assembly nicely integrate its artistic and architectural creators. 

The tour was a much-appreciated opportunity to view Icelandic construction practices, although the team is international. The architects are Danish, the engineers German and even the glass is installed by a group from China. We heard a variety of languages over the course of the afternoon, and witnessed some of the more humorous effects of mistranslation.

Our tour culminated at the largest concert hall, a complex web of wiring and scaffold. I can't even begin to sort it all out, so I'll just show you an image:

And, finally, a view of the construction site from the fifth floor (I think):

The Icelandic community's reaction to the building has been mixed. Many dislike the fact that the architects are Danish (relations between Icelanders and Danish as people seems strained in the wake of Iceland gaining sovereignty from Denmark in 1944). Henning Larsen brought on Olafur Eliasson, an ethnic Icelander, to design the facade in order to placate the public and represent Icelandic involvement in the building's aesthetic. To some extent, the Icelandic media downplay the involvement of Henning Larsen in the building's design in favor of Eliasson. Only in Iceland is Eliasson considered an architect in his own right! 

There was little time for sketching, let alone absorbing the flurry of activity around us. So, that's all for now. Thanks for reading!

Day 1: Arrival in Reykjavik

Current time: 9:09pm. The brightness of the sky matches the time it feels like for my body, which is around 5pm. Two more hours until sun"set" although it won't become completely dark. Even my camera is confused: it seems like its internal clock is telling it to use flash, although it's more than adequately bright for a photo.

Despite our early arrival time and obvious lack of sleep, Pablo wasted little time getting us to work. After a few hours at the charming hotel (our room key looks like this:

 Yes, it's a plastic punch card.) we headed back out to meet Pablo and Spike, the visiting CMU professor for Iceland. We boarded a small boat for Viðey, an island close to Reykjavik. The island is the home of a Richard Serra sculpture called Afangar. The sculpture features several pairs of rough-cut square basalt columns which ring the smaller section of the island. The columns' tops are all level with one another, but their respective heights depend on the topography of the landscape. 


Reykjavik city serves as the backdrop for the southwestern half of the island and a dark rust-colored mountain range adorns the northeastern half beyond the harbor. Capturing the beauty of the dichotomy was difficult, especially without the use of color (I deliberately chose to only work in pen and pencil today, as a starting challenge to myself). I sketched this:

From the actual landscape, which aimed to capture (the angles of these images are different) this:

I think I'll bring my watercolors along tomorrow.


Among the many wonders, both natural and man-made, I found myself drawn to the signage posted on the island. Providing only the barest of essentials, the name of the place it directs the visitor to, these simply wood markers bear the brunt of both weather and the animals nearby. I sketched, in pencil, this image first:

And followed with this:

In the second image, I wished to emphasize the sign by giving it prominence within the drawing, but also frame the view to crop out the location which it indicates. Is a sign only as meaningful as the thing it calls attention to? 


That's all for now, as I get some much-needed rest.

Post #1: It begins!

I write from a moderately bustling Terminal E at Boston's Logan International Airport. After a whirlwind weekend, months of planning, agonizing, and anticipation, I sit alone in an airport and... wait. Fifty minutes remain until boarding and all I can think of is: I'm missing the series finale of Lost.

Of course there's more bouncing around my head besides that. I have a ton of blank paper in my checked luggage, and a bevy of pencils and other media waiting to be applied to those pages. This is more than just a portfolio-building exercise, Scandinavia 2010 is a challenge for myself to develop my abilities to critique architecture thorough 2D media. Rather than make life easier, I believe digital technology throws a heavier responsibility onto our shoulders: that of producing insightful and meaningful interpretations of the world around us. The observations I record here are not merely for my own archival purposes; rather, they only attain meaning when shared.


What I mean is, use the comment function! All of you who know me and are reading this blog should also know that you helped me get here, in whatever small or large way. I appreciate you input and, honestly, it will only help me grow! 


The flight is boarding soon, so I must sign off for now. My next post will be from Reykjavik!


Much love to all!