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Northern Flights
Leifur Eiríksson Terminal,
Keflavík International Airport
Date: 1980-87
Architects: Garðar Halldórsson,
Birgir Breiðal and Sigurður GíslasonClient: Government of Iceland
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Unless you are into long, rough boat journeys, the first stop on any trip to Iceland is, of course, Keflavík International Airport, the largest of the nation’s thirty-three airports – although the term “airport” is perhaps a little misleading since many of them are little more than rough-hewn landing strips. Arriving at Keflavík, rather than diving straight off the plane into the coach to the nearby Blue Lagoon spa as so many tourists tend to do, it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the thickset temple to aviation that is the Leifur Eiríksson Terminal through which you pass.
The building is named after an Icelandic explorer – commonly referred to as the Viking Leif Ericson – who is believed to have discovered North America five hundred years before Christopher Columbus. The name is a fitting tribute, considering that Keflavík Airport was first built as an airbase by the US military during World War II.Previous page: photo courtesy Ozzo Photography. This page: photo by Guðmundur Ingólfsson.
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After the war, civilian passengers wanting to fly internationally continued to pass through what remained a military air base until 1987, when the Leifur Eiríksson Terminal was completed by state architects Garðar Halldórsson, Birgir Breiðal and Sigurður Gíslason.
The Terminal’s heavy concrete structural elements are offset by its open and skylit passenger lounges and tessellated tubular steel roof construction, bookended by the cosmic stained-glass designs of artist Leifur Breiðfjörð. As compactly grand as it is, Keflavík is struggling with the exponential tourism boom that saw 1.2 million visitors pass through its doors in 2015. To ease the load, a new airport masterplan has been drawn up by Oslo-based practice Nordic, which will add a third runway and double the airport’s passenger capacity by 2040. I (gk)
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»Architectural interpretations accepted without reflection could obscure the search for signs of a true nature and a higher order.«
Louis Isadore Kahn
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