Daniel Golling

It is easier to name five contemporary Danish design brands than five living Danish designers. That statement might seem provocative but it usually elicits laughter and a comment along the lines of, “Yes, you’re right,” even from Danes working within the industry. Of course, given a moment, we would be able to come up with more than five names of Danish designers working today, but the question points up a significant phenomenon in today’s Danish design: it is the brands – not the designers – that we hear about and refer to. The brands that have made names for themselves are young, some barely ten years old, and yet they are defining what Danish design is. How did this come about and how has it affected the values associated with the concept Danish design and the country’s design industry in general? The purpose of this book, in essence, is to find answers to these questions and put them in their proper context — that is, in the second golden age of Danish design.

The architecture of Pálmar Kristmundsson belongs both to the wild, tempestuous and stunningly beautiful natural landscape of Iceland and to that country's rapidly urbanising contemporary society. This book follows Kristmundsson's journey from his first encounters with vernacular Japanese architecture in the small fishing village of Þingeyri, to rise to one of the most prominent figures in Icelandic architecture today. He is an architect whose eye is as observant to the contour of the landscape as to the details of a door handle - or, as Gert Wingårdh describes him in the book's introduction, a "master of extremes". Presented here is an account of Kristmundsson's body of work, as well as an examination of the conditions and challenges faced by architecture today.