Last October we participated once again in an open competition in Iceland. Since the credit crunch had hit Iceland pretty hard, a large part of the icelandic architectural offices participated - 31 entries in all. The task was to design an addition to the existing library and reorganizing the existing interior.
Our proposal responds to a new municipal square with large buildings of up to 4-5 stories and at the same time to a small housing street of single family houses of 1-2 stories. It is a hybrid building which transforms and interprets the leftover space necessary to separate these very different public domains, exposing itself in the big scale towards the square while breaking up and lowers itself to fit the intimacy of the housing street. Even the materials selected try to merge the two identities of the site, choosing as the main cladding a bronze sinuscorrugated steel cladding - a subtly refined version of the traditional cladding used in older housing areas in Iceland.
The jury did not find our approach a viable one for the site, choosing to prize entries which all are percieved as signal objects and therefore blows the scale and intimacy of the housing street completely.
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