Basalt, Again

We came into Akureyri in flat grey light at the end of a long driving day, and I photographed this from the bottom of the bank because from down there the grass fills half the frame and the towers come up out of it with nothing else around them.

Two towers, stepped — each one a stack of vertical shafts, the outer ones short, the inner ones taller, so the profile climbs to a point on both sides. Cast concrete, pale, with the clock face set between them. It was completed in 1940 to a design by Guðjón Samúelsson, the state architect, and it is doing the same thing his cathedral in Reykjavík does at greater height: taking columnar basalt — the ranked hexagonal columns you can go and stand in front of at Svartifoss — and rendering it as a facade.

I’d been in front of the real cliff three days earlier without making the connection. Here, with the light dead flat and the concrete grey and the sky grey, it was obvious.

Side stop, fifteen minutes, and then a hot shower at the campsite, which after four days in the camper was worth more than the architecture.