KT Browne | writer

THE RESOUNDING INFLUENCE OF PERSONAL POLITICS ON AN ARCHITECT’S LEGACY

When Icelandic artist Loji Hokulsson was ten years old, he noticed something about the homes in his Reykjavik neighbourhood: many were painted an identical palette of blue, yellow, and white. Intrigued, Loji explored his hometown streets, only to continue noticing this trend. As he grew, so did his fascination with these colours, which eventually led to his discovery of the mind behind them: 20th century Icelandic architect Sigvaldi Thordarson.

“Nobody knows about him,” Loji says. “There's no book about him, no list of houses he’s designed or anything like that, even though he designed hundreds of buildings around Iceland.”

A prolific architect of public and private buildings, Sigvaldi Thordarson is revered among niche architects for his signature colour use and unconventional window placements. Yet he is relatively unknown today, despite a massive creative output. This isn’t a coincidence; Sigvaldi’s fierce dedication to the National Socialist German Workers' Party while pursuing his career tarnished his success and quieted an otherwise impressive legacy. The few remaining records of the architect’s work, beyond hundreds of buildings throughout Iceland, are with his eldest daughter Albina – and lie unfinished.

“The mystique of his life fascinated me,” Loji explains. “I felt drawn to study all his buildings. But to be clear, I’m even more interested in who this man was than what he did.”

Loji runs a popular Instagram account where he publishes photos of all the buildings by Sigvaldi that he can find. Now with upwards of 10,000 followers, the account began as a mood board to ease Loji’s boredom while working at Reykjavik’s local bus terminal. “I had to wake up very early and kill a lot of time,” he says. “I started walking around the terminal in the morning and documenting these buildings on a whim, which eventually became a much larger investigation.” Loji’s exploration is far from over, he says. What keeps him going? Reviving Sigvaldi’s legacy by reframing it entirely.

The shape of a life

Born in 1911, Sigvaldi came of age at the height of World War II, during much of which he spent studying in then-Nazi-controlled Denmark. It was against this political backdrop that his extremist ideology formed. Upon completing his studies, Sigvaldi returned home to Iceland as the country reeled from narrowly escaping Nazi control. Along with a handful of fellow architects, Sigvaldi joined the country’s Architects’ Association and set out to make a name for himself with little luck. He sought large, government-funded projects – apartment complexes, medical facilities and the like – but as word of his politics got around, he was assigned merely private residential properties; a form of social punishment.

The only state-level projects Sigvaldi was given throughout his entire career were small power stations. “They’re still here, and I do think they’re quite beautiful,” Loji says. “I’ve spent the last two years trying to photograph each one. They're stark and striking. Many are quite isolated, and few people ever see them. I don’t even think many know they exist.”

After a few years of unsuccessfully vying for a coveted public project, Sigvaldi accepted that his career was unfolding differently than he’d imagined. Through it all, he remained resolute in his politics – and he made them known, never hushing himself nor pandering to those who granted access to the traditional capstones of an architect’s success. Sigvaldi knew his beliefs were holding him back. He didn’t care.

A professional turning point came when Sigvaldi met fellow architect Petur Mathiasson, with whom he founded a private firm. As a team, the two designed retail stores across Iceland, but the cooperation didn’t last through the post-war recession. “He was a visionary who introduced the Modernist movement to Iceland and produced an incredible amount of work,” Mathiasson says, now a professor of 20th century architectural history at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. “Surprisingly, the most prolific period of his life was his last ten years. He died at just 53 years old, in 1964. Cancer.”

During that decade alone, Sigvaldi produced over 100 designs with the innate sense of proportion and composition he’d come to be known for. Without compromising exterior design nor interior layout – and always managing to merge the two with symbiotic flair – Sigvaldi’s influence as a creative visionary began to crystalise while that of his politics faded. Today, his legacy is alive and well; designers, architects, and consumers alike can walk into any paint store in Iceland and simply ask for ‘Sigvaldi’s Colours,’ for example, to get the precise HEX numbers he so famously used.

Mathiasson defines his former business partner’s legacy as a kind of muted articulation of colour, form, and scale. He believes that people should not discredit the context Sigvaldi worked within: a region marred by political volatility and a stalled economy; a highly politicised time during which one was pressured to pick a side. “The war really impacted his life,” Mathiasson says. “It shaped his entire reputation. It led him to be respected and ridiculed, but in the end, Sigvaldi was always a socialist first – architect second.”

Armed on the homefront

Most admirers of Sigvaldi Thordarson ask the same question: why is so little written about him? His daughter, Albina, asks a different one: why did he make the choices he did? Albina came of age against the backdrop of her father working around the clock from home, handfuls of employees coming and going at odd hours. Always present throughout childhood was her father’s pervasive political ideology and the cost it bore in a painful divorce and her own estranged relationship with him. Albina, now in her eighties, is an architect herself.

“All I wanted was to pave my own career path apart from my father’s sphere of influence,” she says. “That was hard because his work was everywhere at home. So were his people. I had nowhere to call mine.”

Her parents’ divorce sealed decades-worth of bitterness into Albina’s heart. It wasn’t until she began studying architecture formally that an appreciation for her father’s work grew. “My studies made me realise how much he wanted his designs to be seen. But I know my father. He may have wanted that, but what he needed was his politics to be heard.”

Sigvaldi’s death was a pivotal moment for Albina. Thereafter, her career blossomed and any remaining bitterness she held turned into empathy. She can now imagine how hard it must have been for him to see his aspirations fail to be realised, to watch the designs he’d built in his mind rise before him and shape the visual culture of an era, and to have no authority to lend a hand. Surely, that kind of tragedy is never forgotten. “It does affect me still, even now.” Albina admits. “My father could have easily become someone else. We all make our choices.” 🟥

**POST CAPTION** There’s a strange fact about many buildings in Reykjavik, Iceland: they’re painted an identical palette of bold primary colours. Unexpectedly angular, sporting unconventional window placements, doorways and similar oddities, these structures are the brainchild of mid-20th century Icelandic architect Sigvaldi Thordarsson – along with hundreds of buildings he also designed throughout the country.
A quick Google search will reveal little about the prolific architect, and the average architecture aficionado will find it difficult to officially identify his buildings. These information gaps are not a coincidence. Sigvaldi was a Nazi.
Tap on the link in my bio to read about how Sigvaldi Thordarsson’s architecture quietly shaped the aesthetics of an era – and how his politics muted the reach his legacy could have had.
Credit: Albina Thordarsdottir

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