When I moved to Reykjavík in my youth, just before 1980, the city centre looked a bit tattered, to put it politely. The unpaved Hallærisplan (Lousy Square, freely translated) was the centre of the youth culture that had by then developed in Reykjavík. Across from this space of our liminal existence, the boxy and stern-looking Morgunblaðshöllin (Aðalstræti 6) defined the limits between earthen and heavenly existence. At it side was the dishevelled, red-fronted, wondrous maze of a building called Fjalakötturinn, boasting of Europe‘s oldest then-existing cinema. Behind it all the Grjótaþorp, looking like a slum beyond redemption. And I vividly remember that strange bridge or vehicular ramp which provided access to the car park on top of Tollhúsið (Customs Building).

Being a country bumpkin, I found this urban mélange rather strange, but did not really understand what had happened here until I started studying geography. This included reading up on the history of the city and its planning. The story goes as follows: Over this small-scale and organic built environment, dating from the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, a heavy and crude ideological hand had come down with a vengeance. Modernist ideas in architecture and planning, that took shape in continental Europe and North America in the twentieth century, had found their expression in Reykjavík. The city should be sculpted according to the needs of the private car, and the aesthetic premises of functionalism. The clearest expression of this ideology, the Reykjavík Municipal Plan from 1966, is surely a remarkable document in its own brutal way.

However, only a decade later the ideological hegemony of modernism had been somewhat eroded. The fight for the old houses in Bernhöftstorfa, at the lower end of Bankastræti marked the turning point. And when I first perambulated the city centre it was not particulary coherent, to put it politely. Especially ugly and incoherent was the area stretching from Lækjartorg down to the waterfront.

Finally now in 2018 the gaps of the city centre are being filled in, which was long overdue. I quite like the general concept: a dense urban fabric, with shops on the ground floor and flats above. Massive construction has been taking place in recent years. But, over the preceding months, the new buildings north of Lækjartorg have been emerging from under the scaffoldings. And I am, well, not really thrilled by what I see. These new buildings explicitly declare their contempt of history and the eccentricities of the existing built environment in the city centre. Their aesthetic references are squarely towards global capitalism, devoid of any hints to the place where they are located. The flats are priced beyond the reach of all but the richest segment of society. And it is fitting perhaps that the first commercial tenant is H&M – a global retail chain that has not exactly been noted for its local sensitivities. What we seem to have ended up with in the centre of Reykjavík is a Lousy Square of capitalism.