About — Basalt Arkitektar

Basalt Arkitektar

Basalt Arkitektar is a Reykjavík-based practice founded in 2003 on the old harbour, in a timber net loft we still share with a boatbuilder. We work across Iceland on houses, cultural buildings and careful extensions, usually in places where the weather has the last word. Our projects are small in number and long in the making, each one designed and followed through to completion by the same small team. We draw by hand before we model, build large sketch models in the workshop, and spend as many days on site as we can. Over two decades the studio has learned that restraint is rarely the easy option, and almost always the right one. We keep the office small so that we can keep saying yes to the projects that matter.

Practice

Our practice is built on a short list of materials and a long list of questions. Where does the wind come from in February? Where will the snow settle? How does the light move across a room at four in the afternoon in December? We answer these on site, with clients, engineers and local builders around the same table. We favour cast concrete, regional stone and timber, detailed to weather well rather than to look new. Wherever possible we reuse what is already there — a foundation, a wall, a view — and we design for buildings to be repaired, not replaced. Every project is documented and shared openly with the next, and every mistake is written down so that it is made only once. Drawings, samples and models stay in the studio as a working archive.

Approach

We believe architecture in Iceland has a particular responsibility: to sit within a landscape that is still being formed, and to offer shelter without closing people off from it. Our buildings are quiet on the outside and generous within. They frame specific views rather than offering every view, and they treat darkness as seriously as light. We are motivated by the people who live and work in our buildings, and by the craftspeople who build them. Above all, we try to make places that feel as though they could not have been built anywhere else, and that will still feel right long after we are gone. If a building of ours is still quietly useful in a hundred years, we will consider it a success, whatever anyone says about it today.