The Harpa
As we head to the Harpa, we observe that people on the streets of Reykjavik are dressed in vastly disparate ways as they attempt to deal with the weather. We are wearing hoodies over t-shirts, and have our rain jackets in the backpack. It’s in the high 40’s, but the wind can make seem colder. Meanwhile, we see some people totally bundled up with wool scarves over their faces, and one guy walking down the street in shorts.
The Harpa is Reykjavik’s incredible concert hall. It started construction before the economic crisis of 2008, and for a time after the bottom fell out of their currency, there was talk that it would never be completed.
Thank goodness they did, because it is a work of art that just so happens to be a building. It has a façade of glass panes, cut in a crystalline pattern, that fits over the building itself like a giant cap and creates incredible patterns of light and shadow. The walls are black stone that immediately makes you think of lava rock. And the glass, looking out, allows stunning views of the harbor and the sea.
There are many levels to the building, and four main concert halls. Some have walls with specially bent and blackened wooden strips lining the walls to enhance their acoustics, and LED lighting that allows the color of the entire room to be changed in half a second.
One has reversible wall panels with a blunted felt on one side to absorb sound, and wood on the other to reflect it. They reverse the wall panels depending on what type of event is taking place, and what sound needs it has.
The largest hall has similarly impressive features, including sound chambers with doors that can be opened and closed to conduct and amplify the sounds inside. A recent symphony was written especially for performance in this hall, with notations of when the doors should be open and shut, essentially turning the hall itself into an instrument.
The only thing that I don’t love about our tour of the Harpa is all the other Americans in our tour group. They consistently ask questions that the guide has already answered, and one guy from Texas actually tried to push in one of the wall panels in the reversible hall. Tip to Americans traveling abroad - don’t break the fancy walls, please! One lady keeps asking increasingly odd questions about how they move pianos around, to the point that Kristen and I suspect she may be planning some sort of complicated piano heist.
We leave the Harpa sooner than we would like, only to learn that our scheduled Whale Watching tour has been cancelled due to rough seas. After a brief bout of despair, we rally and opt for a dinner of fresh Icelandic fish and watching a nature documentary in a strange little cinema located in an old fisherman’s loft. As we are the only people in the theater, we get to choose which home made Icelandic nature documentary we will watch, and we pick one about volcanoes and the birth of Iceland.
Afterwards, we head back to our guest house, stopping briefly for a hot chocolate in the town square. An excellent first day in Iceland.
The Harpa is Reykjavik’s incredible concert hall. It started construction before the economic crisis of 2008, and for a time after the bottom fell out of their currency, there was talk that it would never be completed.
Thank goodness they did, because it is a work of art that just so happens to be a building. It has a façade of glass panes, cut in a crystalline pattern, that fits over the building itself like a giant cap and creates incredible patterns of light and shadow. The walls are black stone that immediately makes you think of lava rock. And the glass, looking out, allows stunning views of the harbor and the sea.
There are many levels to the building, and four main concert halls. Some have walls with specially bent and blackened wooden strips lining the walls to enhance their acoustics, and LED lighting that allows the color of the entire room to be changed in half a second.
One has reversible wall panels with a blunted felt on one side to absorb sound, and wood on the other to reflect it. They reverse the wall panels depending on what type of event is taking place, and what sound needs it has.
The largest hall has similarly impressive features, including sound chambers with doors that can be opened and closed to conduct and amplify the sounds inside. A recent symphony was written especially for performance in this hall, with notations of when the doors should be open and shut, essentially turning the hall itself into an instrument.
The only thing that I don’t love about our tour of the Harpa is all the other Americans in our tour group. They consistently ask questions that the guide has already answered, and one guy from Texas actually tried to push in one of the wall panels in the reversible hall. Tip to Americans traveling abroad - don’t break the fancy walls, please! One lady keeps asking increasingly odd questions about how they move pianos around, to the point that Kristen and I suspect she may be planning some sort of complicated piano heist.
We leave the Harpa sooner than we would like, only to learn that our scheduled Whale Watching tour has been cancelled due to rough seas. After a brief bout of despair, we rally and opt for a dinner of fresh Icelandic fish and watching a nature documentary in a strange little cinema located in an old fisherman’s loft. As we are the only people in the theater, we get to choose which home made Icelandic nature documentary we will watch, and we pick one about volcanoes and the birth of Iceland.
Afterwards, we head back to our guest house, stopping briefly for a hot chocolate in the town square. An excellent first day in Iceland.