In 1942, Thordarson and Halldórsson decided to build houses for their families in Kleppsholt, the first residential suburb of Reykjavík to be planned as a satellite settlement outside the limits of the city. The houses in the area were either detached or semi-detached, one storey with basement, with either hip roofs typical of Icelandic pre-war functionalism or traditional high pitched roofs. Hollow concrete blocks and wood were common building materials, and most of the houses in the district were low-cost constructions. The architects were assigned two adjacent lots for detached houses at Efstasund 55 and 57. The two dwellings were radically different from the other houses in the area, unconventional in form and painted in bright colours. They were one storey and without a full basement. Both houses consisted of two formally distinct parts with different types of roof: one part was for the living space and the other for bedrooms and study. The designs of the two houses were different although they had certain similarities in form and appearance. The names Thordarson and Halldórsson are on the drawings of both houses, as was the case with most projects in their office at that time. Each was without doubt the creative force behind his own house, as Thordarson's watercolour of his house indicates. In Thordarson's house, the elevations of the living room wing were composed of defined wall-planes and surfaces marked with distinct colours to emphasise the opening of the living space towards the sun. The outer walls were built of concrete blocks and were originally painted with cement-paint (snow-sem) in pale yellow and blue, a colour combination which was typical of Thordarson's later work. Another new feature in Thordarson's house was the large, slanting living room window with a built-in flower bed on the inside. The interior of the house is planned with utmost care to make the most out of a very limited floor area, as can be seen in the floor plan. Every room was carefully dimensioned to accommodate the necessary functions with no square inch of space wasted. The Thordarson family moved into their new suburban home at Efstasund in 1943. In the summer of 1944, a family friend visited them with an American photographer, Samuel Kadorian, who was serving as a soldier in the US Army stationed in Iceland. During the visit, Kadorian took several shots on colour film and a few black and white photographs inside the Thordarsons' home. The pictures are unique as a documentation of a home of a young architect in Iceland during the 1940s. When the Second World War came to an end, Thordarson decided to go abroad as soon as possible to complete his education in architecture. They sold the house at Efstasund 55 in the summer of 1945 and moved to Copenhagen. Upon graduation in 1947, he returned to Iceland with his family and moved into a new apartment on the second floor of Barmahlíd 14 in Reykjavík, a four-apartment house that he had designed with Gísli Halldórsson as part of a larger group of co-operative houses. After four years at The Architectural Office of the Federation of Iceland Cooperative Societies, Thordarson established his own architectural practice in 1951. The office was located in his apartment at Barmahlíd 14. In 1954, he designed and built a large detached house for his family with a studio at Laugarásvegur 39 in Reykjavík, not far away from his earlier home at Efstasund. The house at Efstasund 55 is without doubt one of Thordarson's most important works from his early period. It revealed for the first time several architectural features which became characteristic of his mature work of the 1950s. It has significance as an early example of an architect's solution to a new building type, the one-storey suburban home, which became very popular in the 1950s and 60s. The design of the house was heavily conditioned by economic factors. It was the first home of a young family, built in a time when construction was expensive and building materials hard to get. In response to this, Thordarson's design masterfully combines practical concerns with architectural innovation. The arrangement of the rooms is very efficient and differs from the traditional pattern of the time. It is a bold and forward-looking design, as was to be expected in the own house of a talented young architect. Unlike Thordarson's later houses, the first house was only a dwelling, not a workplace. After starting his own architectural office in 1951, Thordarson preferred to have his office at home. Sadly, the houses at Efstasund 55 and 57 have both been altered with additions and exterior claddings with little regard to the integrity of the original architecture. < BACK
Pétur Ármannsson