Ten or twenty years ago, a major event took place that touched us all, inescapably. In an isolated region of Iceland, a small house disappeared, a victim of the elements, and, whether we knew it or not, we all vanished along with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do we know about this smaller-than-average house, of which only a few black and white photos remain? Artist Hreinn Fri\u00f0finnsson (born 1943) built it in the summer of 1974, in the Reykjanes, a volcanic \u00adpeninsula of the island where he grew up. We also know that Project House<\/em>, as it was called, seemingly placed in the middle of a volcanic depression, helped materialize a literary fiction. Drawing on Thorbergur Thordarson\u2019s novel \u00cdslenskur a\u00f0all<\/em> (1938), Fri\u00f0finnsson built the house along the same lines as the one constructed by the novel\u2019s fantastical Solon Gudmunnsson, who wished that his house be inverted, that is, that the decorations (curtains, wallpaper, etc.) be displayed on the outside of the house, not the inside, so that all might benefit. Fri\u00f0finnsson thus created an empty, floorless house, its outside walls covered in wallpaper and punctuated with photos of its construction. In his strange house, neither home nor place of \u00adcomfort, the exterior became the interior, though an interior now scattered outside its own walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n