Harpa Concert Hall & Conference Centre
Information
Austurbakki 2, Reykjavik
+354 528-5000
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Buy tickets here
About
The whole 28.000 square meters of Harpa stand at the edge of the Reykjavik Harbour with Iceland’s biggest concert hall suitable for a broad range of concerts and cultural events, conference centre with meeting facilities and in-house catering and fine restaurants. Harpa also occasionally hosts promotions, plays, and public events. It’s open to everyone, always, and you should definitely visit Harpa, whether it’s for a show, to buy souvenirs, a concert or a lovely dinner in one of the fabulous restaurants. Harpa was designed by a Danish firm in co-operation with Ólafur Elíasson, an Icelandic artist, and opened to the public in 2011.
Harpa is one of Reykjavík’s best-known landmarks. It is Iceland’s biggest concert and conference hall, hosting a broad range of events including concerts, conferences, meetings, plays, promotions, and public events. Harpa is 28,000 square metres and stands at the edge of Reykjavík harbour. Its glass façade which lights up in the dark is a great sight, especially during Iceland’s long winter nights. In this article, we will tell you more about Harpa.
Visiting Harpa
To see the concert halls themselves, you need either a ticket to a performance or a place on a guided tour. Tours run in English, last around 45 to 60 minutes, and take you into Eldborg and other areas normally closed to the public. Tickets are 5,200 ISK, with a reduced rate of 4,680 ISK for students, seniors and groups of ten or more, and free entry for children aged 12 and under. Book online or at the box office on the ground floor. Private tours — including versions led by an architect or accompanied by live music — need a minimum of ten paying guests and must be arranged in advance by email.
The building sits on the harbour at Austurbakki 2, about fifteen minutes’ walk from the centre of town, with a paid car park underneath and a bus stop alongside. Tours are wheelchair accessible.
The four halls
Harpa’s four halls take their names from the elements, and the themes carry through to the rooms themselves.
Eldborg is the main concert hall and the one most people picture when they think of Harpa — four storeys, a deep red interior, and seating for somewhere around 1,600 to 1,800 depending on how the stage is set. It was built specifically for orchestral performance, it is where the Iceland Symphony Orchestra plays, and it is the room the whole building’s acoustics were designed around. It’s also the hall you get into on the guided tour, which for most visitors is the only way to see it without buying a ticket to something. The name Eldborg is a reference to a famous volcanic crater.
Silfurberg is the second largest at roughly 750, and the most flexible of the four. It’s set up for amplified music, with full lighting and sound rigs, and it can be divided in two — which is why it carries most of the festival and conference programme rather than the classical calendar. The name belongs to Iceland spar, the transparent calcite once quarried in the East Fjords and used in early optical instruments.
Norðurljós, the recital hall, holds around 450 and takes chamber music, smaller gigs and anything that would be lost in Eldborg. Norðurljós is the Icelandic name for the Northern Lights.
Kaldalón is the smallest at about 195, and runs film screenings, talks and intimate performances. Its name, which literally translates to “The cold lagoon,” evokes both the name of Sigvaldi Kaldalóns, iconic Icelandic composer, and the Kaldalón lagoon in the Westfjords from which he took his name and where he worked as a country doctor. In front of Kaldalón, there is Norðurbryggja, (the “Northern Pier”), an open space with a beautiful view over the old harbour of Reykjavík, which makes this area popular for receptions and exhibitions.
The acoustic design across all four was handled by Artec Consultants, and the halls were tuned as rooms before anyone thought about how they should look — which is the standard claim made about Eldborg, and by most accounts a fair one. If you’re trying to work out which hall your gig is in, our Reykjavík events calendar lists what’s on across the building.
The architecture
Harpa was designed by the Danish firm Henning Larsen Architects in cooperation with Icelandic artist Ólafur Elíasson and opened to the public in 2011. The building features a distinctive coloured glass façade inspired by the basalt in Iceland’s landscape. It has a steel framework clad with glass panels of different colours. Lights in the panels can change colour and create different patterns. Harpa features a foyer area, four halls, and a backstage area with offices, a rehearsal hall, and changing rooms. On the fourth floor there is room for smaller shows and banquets. The main halls represent Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, and these themes are reflected in the interiors. The main concert hall, Eldborg, for instance, has a completely red interior, and with the basalt-inspired façade, a comparison to a volcano is easily made. In 2013, the building won the European Union’s Mies van der Rohe award for contemporary architecture.
Photographing Harpa
Harpa is one of the most photographed buildings in Iceland, and the reason is the glass. The panels catch and throw daylight during the day, and after dark the lights inside them shift through colours and patterns, which means the building looks like a different structure depending on when you turn up.
In midwinter the light does most of the work for you — the sun sits low all day and the façade is lit from mid-afternoon, so you can get the full effect without staying up late. In summer the opposite problem applies: it never really gets dark enough for the lights to register, and the building is at its best in flat, bright daylight with the harbour behind it. The far side of the harbour and the walkway towards the Sun Voyager both give you the whole façade in frame; from directly underneath, the honeycomb structure and the reflections are the more interesting shot.
Shops and installations
Rammagerðin, on the ground floor, stocks work by Icelandic designers and craftspeople and is a considerably better bet for souvenirs than most of what you’ll find on Laugavegur. Hljóðhimnar is a free interactive sound installation aimed at children, and the Volcano Express show runs on a short loop through the day for anyone who wants the geology without the drive.
For everything currently scheduled in the building and across the city, see our Reykjavík events calendar, or our guide to festivals in Iceland if you’re planning a trip around a particular date.
Controversy
Plans for Harpa were made and approved before the 2008 Icelandic financial crisis. Construction of Harpa started in 2007, but was halted at about 40% when the financial crisis started. Completion of the project was uncertain and seeing the unfinished building during the crisis was a sore spot for Icelanders. The question why a small city would need such a large venue surfaced during the economic collapse. The government stepped in to fund the rest of the construction costs at a time where there was not enough money to keep all hospitals running and during which Icelanders were dealing with huge debts. Building of Harpa was therefore heavily criticised. However, Harpa has proven its use and is a much appreciated landmark in the city these days.
What to do at Harpa Concert Hall
Harpa is open to everyone, and you should definitely add a visit to Harpa to your itinerary, whether it’s for a show, to buy souvenirs, to go to a concert, to look at its impressive architecture, or to have dinner. Harpa houses the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and there are regular classical concerts. The Icelandic Opera also performs at the concert hall. In addition, there may be guided tours during your visit. These tours are in English and take 30 minutes. During the tour, you learn everything you want to know about Harpa, and you get to see areas normally closed off to the public.
Food and Drink at Harpa
There are two places to eat in Harpa. Hnoss Bistro is on the ground floor, open to everyone in the building, serving drinks and snacks before and after shows alongside an à la carte menu and a paired wine list — local, vegetable-forward cooking built around Icelandic fish and meat, with a terrace connecting the restaurant to the harbour and the downtown side. La Primavera Ristorante is on the fourth floor, with views out over the harbour.
Either works as a stop in its own right, whether or not you’re seeing anything that evening. If you’re carrying on into town afterwards, our guide to Reykjavík nightlife picks up where the concert ends.
Harpa on screen
For a building that only opened in 2011, Harpa has racked up an unusual amount of screen time — and in one case, been blown up.
That was Heart of Stone, the 2023 Netflix thriller, which stages its climactic sequence in Reykjavík and ends with Harpa exploding. The effects team rigged the whole thing on location in April 2022 with stunt performers, airborne vans and several hundred extras running for their lives, and managed to do it without breaking a single pane of glass — no small achievement on a building made almost entirely of the stuff. Hallgrímskirkja turns up in the same film.
Harpa also appears in Black Mirror. “Crocodile”, the third episode of the fourth season, was shot across Iceland in February 2017, during a week when Reykjavík got half a metre of snow in a single night; the scene set here has the main character delivering a speech on environmental policy. Earlier still, the Netflix series Sense8 filmed at Harpa in 2015 for episode ten, “What Is Human?”, in which one character’s Icelandic father performs at the hall.
Off screen, Harpa hosted the European Film Awards in December 2022. It has also, for the record, hosted the World Yo-Yo Contest, which brought more than a thousand competitors from over thirty countries to the harbour in 2017.
