ICELANDIC ANALOGUE.

The austere, grand landscape of Iceland is evoked in a little building which veers from abstraction to perhaps excessive realism.

Aptly, in view of the size of its population, Iceland has the smallest of the embassies, which is rather tucked away in the north-west corner of the site opposite the Norwegians and behind the Danes. It is clad in a strange Icelandic stone, liparit, a material so rare that it is protected, and only parts of cliffs which had fallen off could be used, to be worked in a way never done before to produce a smooth rosy east wall penetrated by a Rationalist grid of square windows, set off by a row of slots which illuminate the ambassador.

Entrance is signalled by a change of material, where the whole of the lower storey seems to shift to the right as if following some sort of geological heave. The new material is ribbed concrete chosen, the architect Palmar Kristmundsson says, because it echoes the corrugated metal of much of the traditional vernacular building of his country.

The honorific smooth face looking east at the Norwegians is balanced to the west by a thin service tower which is also enclosed in glass and corrugated concrete. In the space between the tower, perimeter curve and office slab is a courtyard, not unlike the Norwegian one, but in this case it is purely decorative, being paved with irregular slabs of black Icelandic lava which can be lit from below by lamps that try to evoke vulcanic fires -- a Disneyesque touch which rather lets down an otherwise gentle and thoughtful building.