SP(R)INT STUDIO and Nissen Richards Studio Turn a Mývatn Visitor Center into a Window on Volcanic Iceland

Most visitor centers in dramatic landscapes make the same mistake: they build a darkened box, fill it with screens, and ask you to look at a picture of the thing standing just outside the door. The Gígur Visitor Center in Mývatn takes the opposite position. Reykjavik-based SP(R)INT STUDIO and London-based Nissen Richards Studio designed the permanent exhibition, interiors, graphics, welcome area, café and shop inside an existing 400 m² building on the edge of Lake Mývatn. They treated the volcanic terrain around it as the main exhibit.

What interests us is restraint used as a design method. This is not a new building, and the brief did not call for one. Working for Vatnajökull National Park and the Environment Agency of Iceland, the team carried out a light-touch refurbishment that organizes geology, ecology and culture around the windows. Pippa Nissen has said the design deliberately avoids competing with the panorama of lake, pseudo craters and mountains. That sounds modest, but in a field that tends toward spectacle it is a pointed choice, and the interior bears it out.

A Gateway Set Low in the Lava Field

From a distance the building barely registers. It reads as a loose cluster of pale and dark volumes crouched among snowy mounds, with a crater rim behind it and a broad mountain closing the view. That low profile matters. Mývatn is a nature reserve shaped by eruptions and known for its birdlife, and it is also a threshold into the wider Vatnajökull National Park. A gateway building here should orient you without upstaging what you came to see.

The glazed pavilion with its low hipped metal roof and timber deck is the piece that faces the landscape most directly. At dawn it sits in the lava terrain almost like a lookout hut, which is roughly how the interior asks you to use it.

Dark Timber, Big Glass, Warm Light

The dark timber cladding and full-height corner glazing give the pavilion a clear reading at every hour. In autumn it frames the lake and a conical peak beside a curving path. At dusk it becomes a lantern on the snow, and the central double door on the front elevation makes the entry legible from the drive.

Because the project was a refurbishment, the commentary here is less about authorship of the shell and more about how the interior team leaned into what the shell already offered. Generous glass is a gift to an exhibition designer who wants the outside in, and they used it accordingly.

An Exhibition Hall Under the Roof Structure

Inside, the exposed timber trusses and gabled ceiling stay visible, and a central skylight drops daylight onto the floor. The designers did not hide the structure behind a suspended ceiling or a black box. Track lighting, coordinated with lighting designer Hildiberg, sits within the trusses rather than replacing them.

The angular display tables are the key move. They are low, so they keep sightlines clear across the room and out through the windows. A red globe and a hanging bird model add a few vertical accents, but the hall stays horizontal and open, much like the landscape it describes.

Exhibits That Point Outward

The organizing idea is simple and effective: exhibits around the internal perimeter relate to the views directly beyond them. A ribbon of windows frames the lake and grassy hills above pale green plinths, so you read about a landform and then lift your eyes to see it. The museum becomes a set of annotated views instead of a sealed sequence of rooms.

Low sun throws long window shadows across the tables in winter, and in autumn the glazed walls fill with green. The exhibition changes with the season without anyone changing a label. Small wooden chairs and a round table in the corner suggest the room is meant for lingering, not just passing through.

Rock, Soil and Pressed Plants You Can Touch

The tactile layer is where the project earns its credibility. A lava rock sits in front of a printed braided river image. Pressed plants are sealed in clear glass panels that visitors can handle and rearrange. Wooden drawers beneath sloped display tops pull open to reveal soil samples. These are specimens, not stand-ins.

The sloped tops with printed labels are a quiet piece of graphic design: legible, close to the hand, and calm enough not to compete with the objects. Credit also goes to Spekta for production and installation, because displays like these depend on robust, well-made joinery that can take years of handling.

Designed for Small Visitors and Local Ones

Children appear throughout the photographs, and the design accommodates them. Wooden step stools raise kids to window height so they can look across snowy fields at a red farmhouse. A grey bean bag invites them to lie back in front of a projection of a crater lake. Even the projection, the one screen-based moment we see, depicts the immediate terrain rather than replacing it.

Karl Kvaran of SP(R)INT STUDIO has framed the center as both a tourist destination and a resource for local communities. The farmhouse in the window makes that point better than any wall text could. This is a lived-in landscape, not a wilderness diorama, and the interior lets you see the neighbors.

Welcome Area, Shop and Café

The commercial and arrival spaces use the same calm palette. Birch plywood shelving and a display counter sit on a polished concrete floor that runs toward the windows, and a framed relief map of Iceland hangs on a cream wall. The map is doing real work here: it places you in the country before the exhibition places you in Mývatn.

Plenty of visitor centers treat the shop as an afterthought bolted onto the exit. Here it reads as part of the same interior language, and the window views extend into it too.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan clarifies the arrangement: a main building with wings, plus the glazed pavilion holding the angular central displays. Entrance arrows, outdoor tables and the curving drive show how arrival is choreographed. Read alongside the aerial view of the cluster on the frozen plain, the plan confirms how small the intervention is relative to the terrain it serves.

Why This Project Matters

Gígur is a useful counterexample to the idea that a visitor center must justify itself with a signature building or an immersive black box. SP(R)INT STUDIO and Nissen Richards Studio took an existing 400 m² structure, kept its timber roof and glass, and organized the content around the views. The result is cheaper in carbon and spectacle, and arguably richer in meaning, because every exhibit is checked against the real thing outside.

For designers working in sensitive landscapes, the lesson is about hierarchy. Decide early what the star is, then design everything else to support it: low tables, legible graphics, real specimens, step stools at the window. We would like to see more interpretation projects in protected areas take this stance, treating the building as a well-tuned instrument for looking rather than an object to be looked at.

The Gígur Visitor Center by SP(R)INT STUDIO and Nissen Richards Studio. Location: Mývatn, Iceland. Area: 400 m². Year: 2025. Client: Vatnajökull National Park and the Environment Agency of Iceland. Lighting design: Hildiberg. Production and installation: Spekta. Photography: Claudio Parada Nunes.

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