During the summers of 2014, 2015 and 2016 there was a street-food court down in Fógetagarður in downtown Reykjavík which me, Baldur, Sveinn and Snorri designed and built each year.
The first summer it was held, it was a part of a project called Torg í Biðstöðu. I remember that we got this project because we proposed another one: To build accommodation for sea-swimmers; showers and such, down at Ægissíða, using the excess hot water from the surrounding area that is poured into the sea there. The city liked the idea but found it to be a bit too ambitious to design and build in just a few weeks.
So we got another gig. To design and build a food court that Gerður Jónsdóttir and Ólafur Ólafsson were planning. It got the name KRÁS.
It was a fun project although each year we had some sort of difficulties. In 2014 it was the Health Inspection - which came just a few days before it opened for the first time. They had some problems with all the cats in the neighbourhood and the flying pollen. That our food stands were too “open” and the cats could get in and piss in the stalls and all the pollen could fly into the food…
Their reasoning was a bit weird, so we got a lawyer to check what they were commenting on. The answers we got was that there were no written rules - the members of the Health Inspection just decided things based on how they felt during that particular day when they made the inspection.
So - as you can’t really fight with how the members of the Health Inspection feel - we had to change the design. We had to get creative, as we had no time to spare - and probably no budget either. We needed to close the food stalls better - but one of the dominant things in our design was that the stalls were supposed to be open, scattered across the square. We ended up moving the stalls, forming two straight lines and using a plastic wrapper, we wrapped the whole food court, so the stalls were see-through (open), but the opening to serve was smaller. No cats could get in (yes they could) and the pollen stayed away (unfortunately we do not control the wind), and the health inspection gave us the green light.
