Hljómskálagarðurinn
Riverside music pavilion whose card-table fundraising took two years to finish a building still standing a century on.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Hljómskálagarðurinn in Reykjavik opens on New Year's Eve 1922, with a brass band climbing onto a roof that had no walls standing beneath it yet, playing into four degrees of frost. It follows why sources still disagree on the building's completion date, and how the band financed Iceland's first music-only building themselves, plank by plank, partly through card games at a restaurant called Fjallkonan. You'll hear about architect Guðmundur H. Þorláksson's decision to leave the roof flat, and why this stayed the country's only purpose-built music venue for decades.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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