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Architecture of the Faroe Islands

March 26th, 2024 | LN | Culture 

The Faroe Islands are an archipelago in the North Atlantic, roughly halfway between Iceland and Scotland. They have their own language and currency and are an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. The islands are home to more sheep than people and more boats than cars with mild winters, cool summers and precipitation 210 days per year on average. Travel between the islands was historically by boat but today a network of undersea tunnels make travel by car or bus increasingly easy. 

 

Few trees and other construction materials naturally occur on the islands, so nearly all home building products are brought to the islands by boat from Denmark. The oldest buildings were made from local stone and topped with sod roofs, while more recent buildings are wood framed, wood clad, and topped with corrugated metal roofing or a traditional sod roof. Largely due to the high cost of construction materials and the complexities of oversea shipping, the buildings are simple in form and modest in scale and material. The homes usually have simple, rectangular floor plans, gabled roofs and small windows. With few exceptions, the homes are painted a color from a selective palette of black, white, red or yellow. Almost nobody has a garage, and those who do keep them largely empty, in stark contrast to the average American garage. When you cluster a handful of these charming little structures together with a backdrop of rugged, green topography and a foreground of blue ocean, the result is a charming, colorful little town without pretense. 

 

A unique building typology found in the Faroe Islands are hjallur, food drying sheds regularly seen around the islands, often isolated from residential buildings and perched alone on steep, grassy slopes exposed to the wind. The buildings are used to ferment fish and meat and result in local delicacies described as having “an acquired taste.” The little buildings are often structured in stone on the ends and feature wood slat walls that allow the briny air to pass through and circulate around the fish or lamb that is hung inside. According to locals, some with a particularly refined sense of taste can identify the island it came from by the food’s taste.

 

The images below show a selection of Faroese architecture observed on a trip to the islands in 2022. All photography by Leo Naegele.

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