Pálmar Kristmundsson still remembers his fisherman father’s final attempt to make a sailor out of him. “He took me out in his boat,” recalls the Icelandic architect, now in his sixties. “We were not even out of the fjord when I started to vomit. He turned the boat around, threw me on the pier and said, ‘You will never become a sailor.’ And he left me there.”
If his father’s assessment ever stung, Kristmundsson is over it. At the age of 17, he left his home village of Thingeyri to study architecture, first in Denmark and then in Japan. In 1985, he founded the Reykjavik architecture and design studio
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An Icelandic architect’s unique getaway on the grounds of a defunct concrete factory just might be the catalyst that reinvigorates a struggling community