BY BRADFORD MCKEE
Landslag, of Reykjavík, takes home the 2018 Rosa Barba Prize.
FROM THE NOVEMBER 2018 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
The site, the Saxhóll Crater, is part of Snæfellsjökull, a volcano on a far western finger of Iceland that is the starting point for Journey to the Center of the Earth, the 1864 science fiction novel by Jules Verne. This worn-down cone of lava, 125 feet high, is a popular stop for tourists who want to walk up to its summit amid patches of multicolored mosses, lichens, arctic thyme, and bog bilberry to see views of the Atlantic Ocean and the surrounding glacier cap, which is expected to disappear within 50 years. Tourism is up sharply in Iceland, quadrupling since 2010 to two million visitors in 2017. The wear was evident on the crater’s flank, where the path to the summit was degrading and splitting into multiple tracks, not helped by random, gabion-like treads where the going got especially rough.
The project of preserving the crater’s fragile ecology along with access to people fell to Thrainn Hauksson, of the landscape architecture office Landslag, in Reykjavík. Hauksson’s office designed the simplest thing possible—a low-set metal stair to follow the path’s course to the top. The stair is made up of modules three meters long and 1.5 meters wide that hold seven treads each between solid stringers with open risers. The units join together “like a necklace on the slope,” Hauksson says.
The Crater Stairway follows the line of an overly worn path to the top. Photo by Thrainn Hauksson.
On September 28, the Saxhóll Crater Stairway was awarded the 2018 Rosa Barba International Landscape Prize out of nine finalist projects at the 10th Barcelona International Biennial of Landscape Architecture. The jury’s chair, Gary Hilderbrand, FASLA, called it “singularly elegant, economical, technically precise, and visually expressive,” and added that it “wrestles poetically with crucial matters of the advance of global tourism and climate disturbance.” In accepting the award, Hauksson, a quiet-spoken designer (one of only about 80 landscape architects in Iceland) said modestly of the project: “We didn’t want to be invasive but to do what was necessary.” One sign of the stair’s success, Hauksson offered, is the whorls of alpine lady’s mantle thriving beneath the shelter of the open treads.
The Saxhóll Crater Stairway curves up the 125-foot elevation, with a place to stop and sit part of the way up. Photo by Thrainn Hauksson.
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