Classical Iceland
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Concert hall · Capital region, Reykjavík

Harpa

Harpa was designed from 2005 and opened on 4 May 2011, so it was finished through the crash that began in 2008. The Mies van der Rohe jury gave it the 2013 award for that above all, a country choosing to complete a cultural building in the middle of a recession. Its south wall is more than a thousand glass modules of a twelve-sided shape called the quasi brick, worked out by the geometer Einar Þorsteinn Ásgeirsson in the 1980s and made into a façade by Ólafur Elíasson with Henning Larsen. The glass is filtered, so its colour changes with the light falling on it. Eldborg, the largest of the halls, seats about 1,500, and the Iceland Symphony plays there.

Harpa seen across a snow-covered Arnarhóll, with the harbour behind it.
Picture: Gary J. Wood · CC BY-SA 2.0

Location

Address
Austurbakki 2101 Reykjavík
Website
harpa.is ↗

Visiting

Outside concerts
Open to visitors
Access
Three lifts run from the car park under the building to the second, third, fourth and fifth floors. Every concert hall has marked wheelchair spaces, booked through the box office. Wheelchair-accessible toilets are on every main floor. A visitor who wears hearing aids can borrow a receiver for the building's infrared listening system by telling the box office when buying tickets. The transmitters are in Eldborg, Silfurberg, Norðurljós and Kaldalón and nowhere else in the building. The same four halls keep seats for a visitor with a guide or assistance dog, also booked in advance.

Halls

What is on

A black-and-white film still of a screaming woman.
19:30Film

Psycho

Eldborg, Capital region, Reykjavík

From ISK 4,900

Christoph Koncz stands holding a baton in front of gilded wall panels.
Picture: Andreas Hechenberger
19:30Gala

Vienna Concert

Eldborg, Capital region, Reykjavík

From ISK 4,100

Barbara Hannigan conducts on a dark stage, lit from the front with both hands raised.
Picture: Marco Borggreve
19:30Symphony

Prometheus

Eldborg, Capital region, Reykjavík

From ISK 3,100