Studio Granda.

Apart from being an imaginative response to a tricky brief, Studio Granda's remodelling of a corner iste in downtown Reykjavik into a gallery and apartments is emblematic of how the city could renew itself. The programme Pitted history against modernity, as part of the site was occupied by a corrugated iron-cald house dating from 1904 and still inhabiteed by descendants of the original family. The house is remarkable not only for its age (Reykjavik is a very young town), but also for the fact that Iceland's most renowned painter, Johannes kjarval, lived and worked there as a young man.

Out of this impasse, Studio Granda propose a multi-level gallery at street level, with three floors of apartments above. This building's green roof forms a new, tranquil setting for the historic house, preserved and rebuilt high above the blare of bars and shops below. New parts are clad in finely seamed panels of flat copper, with the reconstructed house wrapped in corrugated copper to replace the rotting, vernacular iron. Exhibition spaces will be colonised by the local i8 Gallery which specialoses in an eclectic melange of Icelandic and international contemporary art. C.S.