The Columns, Finished

Last morning, a few hours before the airport, and a storm cloud coming across from the west with the sun still out underneath it — so the concrete went almost white against a sky the colour of slate. I took it from the corner rather than head on, because from there you see the tower and the flank at once and the shafts on the side wall read as what they are: a series.

The design dates from 1937 and the building was not finished until 1986, which is most of a working life and then some. That gap is part of why it looks the way it does — a piece of 1930s national-romantic modernism, poured slowly, in a country that spent those decades becoming independent and then becoming rich.

By this point in the week I had spent seven days looking at the source material. Columnar basalt at Svartifoss, and again in the gorge below Hengifoss, and again in the walls at Grjótagjá. Then the towers at Akureyri two days ago and this one now. Whatever else it is, it is not an imported style: it is the landscape of the island, cast at building scale, in the one material the island could make for itself.

A good last frame. We handed the camper back that afternoon.