Views
Access
Project Name
Volcano Eyes
Building Typology
Visitor's Centre
Location
Hverfjall, Iceland
Year
2022
Project Status
Design Competition
Issuing Organization
Buildner
Volcano eyes is a visitor centre and coffee house whose concave roof lends it a dramatic and elegant profile that silhouettes the form of a volcanic crater.
Carefully isolated at the base of the Hverfjall volcano in Northern Iceland, the coffee house is a simple, square 20m x 20m building constructed from locally sourced rammed earth. It offers basic amenities such as an information centre and a café overlooking a generous circular courtyard and viewing deck outside. The well-defined courtyard is an attraction in its own right, as it invites the public inside and helps dissolve the boundary between inside and out.
Volcano Eyes offers a space for hikers to rest and refresh, with its courtyard framing views of the sky and the towering volcanic crater above. A shallow reflection pool, centered beneath the opening to the sky, captures the shifting colors of dawn and dusk, mirroring the volcano’s majestic presence and deepening the viewer’s connection to light, sky, and the act of perception.
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Carefully positioned window openings create focal points that draw the eye up and down the slopes of the volcano, accentuating the contrast between the building’s enclosed form and the expansive horizon. This dynamic interplay reflects our scale and intrinsic bond with nature.
Using rammed earth as nature's own building material.
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The project's concern with deep sustainability grows out of the fragility of the Icelandic landscape. The coffee house, built primarily from locally sourced rammed earth, blends seamlessly into its environment, poetically camouflaging itself within the natural terrain.
At 20m long, 500mm thick, and ranging from 3-5m high, the insulated wall stabilizes temperature variations. Constructed from local soils mixed with concrete, it retains warmth in the winter, and it's substantial thermal mass cools the building in the summer. Both durable and highly sustainable, rammed earth reduces the buildings' carbon footprint by 60% compared to concrete, is recyclable and has low transport emissions as the material is already on site.
Capturing the View
A daylight-driven approach
Given the site's exposure to harsh weather, the building sits low in the landscape to help mitigate the extremes in temperature. The proposed square massing and orientation optimizes passive solar performance and reduces negative wind turbulences.
The building is designed with high daylight diffusion in mind, through the insertion of a 11m wide sky opening. Nevertheless, an LED lighting system will be used including daylight compensation and occupancy detection to further reduce energy consumption.
Capturing the Light
