Surrounded by the majestic geological landscape, Mývatn Beer & Bath House, a supplemental multi-purpose facility affiliated with Sel Hotel, is designed to become a tourist attraction for beer-orientated events that celebrates Icelandic locality and integration with regional nature. It offers a perfect location and viewpoint to welcome all visitors to immerse themselves in this stunning scenery. Facing north with Myvatn lake and Skútustaðagígar Craters in front of the building, the facility creates an intimate relationship between built interior space and exterior environment in a harmonious manner. The whole timber structure is lifted upward from the ground by approximately 1 meter in order to optimize the sightline toward the renowned lake and crater.
With full height vision glass at 1st level, boundaries divided indoor and outdoor get obliterated. As a result, a 360-degree panoramic view opens up to the people, visually connecting to the natural wonder of Mývatn region.
Operated by Mývatn Öl, the family-managed brewery, the main character of the house, offers customers various unique types of beer by using meticulous fermentation processes. Instead of keeping the whole manufacture behind the scenes, brewery space as the heart of Mývatn B&B House aims to maintain a welcoming gesture and embrace all kinds of public engagement via making the brewery as the epicenter of the space, maximizing the promotion of the beer-making process and tasting experience.
The whole tectonic idea of the building is a centralized cylindrical core surrounded by multi-level platforms. In plan view, the cylinder was slightly offset from the center of the squarish house footprint. Such intentional asymmetry creates unequal size of space and corner to adapt to different program requirements. Brewery space, the main focal point, is encapsulated in this transparent glass cylindrical core that is full of special ventilation system and equipment, like fermentation tanks, electric brewing system, and beer kegs. In addition, this full-building-high cylinder volume is also the aggregation of the crucial structural trunk of this timber building; beams and secondary columns radiate and expand outward from the core to the periphery of the house. Inside the house, the whole interior experience mutates from a linear tour, connecting stepping multi-level platform that all circling the cylindrical brewery space. In each level, there are windows facing outward to different orientations of the site. On the top level (roof deck), people can overlook the whole nature. Additionally, a circular sunken bathing tub is installed on top of the cylindrical structure, shared by local residents and visitors, to end the whole spatial narrative with Icelandic bathing culture.
