Hasta La Ideas

Voici cette impressionnante vidéo en time-lapse dévoilant de superbes paysages sur une musique de Of Monsters and Men. Une réalisation de Doug Urquhart et son studio The Upthink Lab, parti avec sa femme Karen 2 semaines en Islande pour célébrer leur 3ème anniversaire de mariage. Plus d’images dans la suite.

Drivers along a coastal road in Iceland can now stop at a curved concrete service station styled like an American diner by architects KRADS of Iceland and Denmark.

Designed for the Icelandic branch of fuel company Shell, the Stöðin accommodates a restaurant and drive-through, as well as a shop and petrol station.

A thick concrete band wraps around the top of the exterior walls to create a canopy with an illuminated underside.

The ceiling inside the building is also exposed concrete, while cushioned panels of red, orange and yellow provide seating inside the restaurant.

Other interesting service stations from the Dezeen archive include a roadside restaurant in Spain and an alpine petrol station in Switzerland.

See all our stories about service stations »

Photography is by Kristinn Magnússon.

Here’s some more text from KRADS:

Stöðin – Roadside Stop

“Stöðin”, a roadside stop in the Icelandic countryside, is a conjoined restaurant, drive-through, convenience store and gas station. Icelandic culture is in many ways shaped by American influences due to the 65-year long presence of an American army base in the country.

Stöðin addresses this cultural relationship by incorporating architectural elements from the American diner that contrast the traditional Icelandic building method of in situ cast concrete.

The exposed concrete of the exterior bestows the diner with a permanence unknown by its American counterparts creating a friction between its streamlined aesthetics and the rustic materiality’s gravity. An elongated bar-desk transforms into seating arrangements and characterizes the semicircular restaurant, which offers panoramic views of the scenic fjord Borgarfjörður.

Location: Borgarnes, Iceland.
Size: 312 m2
Building lot: 4.840 m2
Year compl.: 2012
Client: Skeljungur, the Icelandic arm of Shell.
Collaborators: Aok-design (on interior), Ferill (engineering, structural/HVAC),
Mannvit (electrical engineering).

Slideshow: this wooden cabin in Iceland by Reykjavik studio Arkís is split into asymmetric apartments with roofs that slope in alternate directions.

Located across the bay from the town of Akureyri, the three apartments that comprise Villa Lola each have living rooms that face out across the water.

Both the walls and roof of the building are clad in larch that has been pre-weathered to give it a muted grey colour.

One concrete wall increases the stability of an otherwise wooden stud-framed structure, which is lined with plasterboard on the walls and either wood or concrete terrazzo on the floors.

All three apartments have a first-floor mezzanine.

Dezeen recently travelled to Iceland as part of DesignMarch in Reykjavik. See photographs from our architectural tour of the city, as well as our visits to designer’s studios.

Photography is by ?

The information below is from Arkís:

VillaLóla

The design of villa Lóla was an especially enjoyable dialogue process between client and architect.

Various ideas of materials, concepts and techniques where discussed in the process. Inspirations range from Swiss mountains cabins, a sea ranch in Sonoma County in California, and Japanese solutions in spatial efficiency. Furthermore, the framing of views was an important topic of discussion.

The natural surroundings of the site and the fjord of Eyjarfjördur were key factors to address.

Design

The client requested the possibility to divide the house into three spaces, or apartments that could be enlarged or reduced as needed.

Villa Lola is 128m² of gross floor area.

Another request from the client was to use low maintenance materials and to develop an inclusive approach with regards to the site and building.

Based on these requests the design process started.

Location

The experience of being on site played a major role in the design. The house faces Akureyri across Eyjarfjodur bay with unrestricted mountain views, to the north and south.

Villa Lola is strongly rooted in its surroundings, playing of the dignity of the landscape and the uniqueness of his appearance. The form of the building is composed of three peaks that point towards the sky, forming a valley between the roof slopes. The roof form is indicative of the landscape; mountains, valleys and a fjord surround VillaLola.

The approach to the house is from above, which gives the building unique unrestricted views of Akureyri, the largest town of northern Iceland.

Weight of Nature

It was decided to seize the natural gradations of the site where natural light and beautiful color combinations are formed at different times of the year, grass, straws, weeds and birch woods surround the house and elevate the exceptionally strong appearance of the larch surfaces. The natural landscape of the site was left undisturbed.

Materials

VillaLola is built with a frame of sustainable goal settings.

Villa Lola is clad on the exterior with Larch-wood. The larch is weathered to its nature gray-ish color, forming a natural weather protection. All loadbearing members are of wood except for one concrete wall, used for stabilizing the structure, and a concrete foundation.

Flooring is of robust wooden boards and concrete terrazzo. Inner walls are gypsum surfaced stud frame walls painted with environmentally friendly paint. All windows are of wood, clad with aluminum on the exterior.

During the construction process the plot was carefully protected and the working space around the building was minimized.

During construction, all waste was carefully sorted and appropriate materials sent to recycling.

The building is specially designed as a low maintenance structure.

Textasiða, a typography exhibition by graphic designers Snæfríð Borsteins and Hildigunnur Gunnarsdottir, was on show last month at Crymogea as part of DesignMarch 2012 in Rekjavic, Iceland.

The exhibition comprised large wall-mounted tablets with racks of moveable letters like Scrabble tiles.

The letter blocks come in different sizes and allow the user to rearrange them to create messages and sayings.

The variations in the size of each letter block play with light and shadow, changing as the blocks are moved around. The exhibition also included a hand-bound book of Icelandic birds by Benedict Gröndal Sveinbjarnarson.

The images above were taken with the Pentax K-01 camera designed by Marc Newson, which was kindly given to us by Pentax for the trip. You can also see our architecture tour and studio visits from the trip, or watch an interview with Marc Newson talking about the camera on Dezeen Screen.

Iceland’s small-batch spirit distilled over lava rocks

Only a handful of components are necessary for making Reyka vodka: a grain spirit made from quality wheat and barley, water, geothermal energy, lava rock filtration and a custom-crafted, copper Carter-Head still. The incredibly smooth spirit is the upshot of Iceland’s pristine environment, which affords the distillery an extremely pure brewing process. We recently had the chance to meet with Reyka’s master distiller Kristmar Olafsson in Borgarnes, who shed greater insight on their small-batch production.

Steam produced by molten rock is funneled in a stainless steel pipe to the distillery, where it heats Olafsson’s beautiful Carter-Head gin still, which was handcrafted in Scotland. One of only six in the world, Reyka’s earns the unique distinction of being the only one used for crafting vodka. This gives Olafsson the advantage of controlling the spirit’s path, manually manipulating the machine throughout the process and capturing only the best part of the spirit for bottling. Traditional vodka stills force the distiller to use the entire spirit from beginning to end, and in order to remove impurities it has to be distilled again.

“When we start to distill—this is just like when you’re boiling water in the kitchen—the vapors start to rise up when the spirit is close to 100 degrees [celsius], and we keep it inside the tower here in the beginning because when the vapors start to rise up it passes through a lot of copper pipes. Everything is created just to remove impurities from the spirit, and we distillate, or boil it, for about 30-40 minutes and keep it always inside the tower. The lightest ingredients stay in the upper part of the still, and that’s the part we are removing from the spirit. These are the impurities that give it a bad taste and bad smell.”

Olafsson removes about 30-40 liters of impure liquid in this initial process, which is simply discarded. He knows when the time is up by his expert sense of smell, and the remaining desirable vapor is pushed to another tower in the still, cooled down for a bit and returned to a liquid state. They then distill about 1,200 liters of 96% alcohol for five or six hours, resulting in the spirit that is used for Reyka later on. The last 250 liters is significantly weaker at around 35% alcohol, which they separate and use for flavor-infused vodkas like Opal Red.

To bring the spirit down to a more drinkable 80 proof, they blend it with water from the nearby Grábrók spring, ideally located on a 4,000-year-old lava field. This is then run through actual lava rocks—which they change about every three months—for the ultimate in natural filtration.

One taste of Reyka vodka and it’s clear that something is different. It feels silky on the palate, and the clean flavor is easily sipped neat. Currently the eight-person team at Reyka is producing around only 400,000 bottles a year, but Olafsson hopes to increase this over time, slowly but surely. His distribution approach is not unlike that of his distillation process, both the result of extreme patience and well-earned instinct.

You can purchase Reyka at shops throughout the U.S. and U.K. (as well as in Iceland) for around $20 a 750ml bottle.

See more images in the slideshow. Photos by Karen Day