Ægisíða

This guide to the Ægisíða shoreline in Reykjavik follows the architect Sigvaldi Thordarson, who trained in wartime Copenhagen and spent twenty-three years designing somewhere between two and three hundred buildings around the city before his death in 1964, at fifty-three. You'll hear about the low modernist house he designed along this road in 1956 for a shipping merchant, and about the decade he spent racing a cancer diagnosis while still designing more than a hundred buildings in the yellow-and-blue palette Icelanders now call Sigvaldi colours. It also traces this shoreline path along Skerjafjörður, past old baiting sheds and within sight of the president's residence across the water. Walk the road slowly and see how many of his color blocks you can pick out among the houses.