The National Bank of Iceland

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND

2007

CLIENT

Landsbankinn

TYPOLOGY

Work

SIZE M2/FT2

20,000 / 215,278

STATUS

IDEA

The National Bank of Iceland, Landsbankinn held an international design competition for a new building in the center of Reykjavik, to consolidate the bank’s operations under one roof instead of operating from different locations around the country. BIG’s proposal was chosen for it’s vision to combine both the bank’s and the public’s interests: a corporate HQ that could function as an urban center.

BIG conceived the bank as a simple urban perimeter block of 1100 workstations and the executive floor surrounding a large public space on the ground with all the banking facilities, including café and art galleries for the bank’s art collection. Bordered by two radically different contexts, the park and the sea on one side and the historic downtown on the other, BIG envisioned a building so flexible that it would become the architectural imprint of the forces of the city around it.

Rather than blindly following the local plan, BIG proposed to tilt the roof of the urban block...

...to create a differentiated volume responding specifically to the immediate surroundings.

Towards Lækjartorg the entire facade would cave in, creating a covered extension of the square, allowing citizens to linger under the shelter of the bank.

Towards Arnarhóll the façade would cave in to create an urban stage exactly where the national day celebrations take place.

The north facade was pulled back to align with the urban waterfront along Geiersgata.

The roofline of the block was pulled back away from the cultural path, transforming it from a narrow crack to a well-illuminated canyon.

Towards the south and west the façade is pulled back to create 2 sunlit caves while minimizing direct sunlight on the facades.

Finally the two receding facades form an urban archway over the central courtyard, turning it into an urban void illuminated by a zigzag-shaped skylight, like a crack in a glacier.

The architecture of Landsbankinn is like an urban form of the Icelandic landscape, its characteristic shapes, peaks, caves and canyons are the results of exterior forces acting upon it.

To achieve the most transparent glass with no shading or toning, BIG proposed to deal with the need for heat reflection and sun screening through the use of tiny dots of silver on the exterior glass facades.

The actual percentages of sun screening, ranging from 0 to 60% were based on thermal simulations.

The silver dots would constitute an imperceptible raster responding to the requirements of the sun shading: dense towards the south, nothing towards the north, etc.

The inner void is the spatial imprint of the urban volume. Its sloping walls expand and contract the void in different directions, providing several surfaces for the light to bounce on its way from the sky to the space below. The different angles provide visitors and bankers with varying perspectives of each other as well as the city below and the sky above.

The program of the bank is flexible and generic, subject to ever changing ways of working in a business that is becoming more and more and immaterial. The flexible interior makes it open to respond to the exterior forces of the city.

The imploded Landsbankinn bank ‘block’ is at the same time integrated and outstanding, traditional and contemporary. As an added bonus, the building’s façade caves in to create a stage-like space where the annual gathering for the National Day of Iceland usually takes place.

Bjarke Ingels Thomas Christoffersen Agustin Perez-Torres Catherine Huang Sonja Reisinger Morten Wulff Grisha Zotov Simon Potier Marcello Cova Junhee Jung Janghee Yoo Jung Ik Kong Maria Glez Cabanellas Line Gericke