Over the last months, the Museum of Design and Applied Art has been archiving the work of the architect Högna Sigurðardóttir (1929–2017).
Högna was born in the Westman Islands in 1929. She studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1949–1960.
Högna lived and worked most of her life in France. She designed five villas that were built in Iceland in the seventies which have now become a valuable part of Icelandic architectural heritage Among those, Bakkaflöt 1 in Garðabær is the most renowned (only a 10 min walk from the museum). This house was nominated as one of the 100 most significant buildings of the 20th century in northern and central Europe in a publication of an international overview of architecture. Högna also designed a swimming pool in Kópavogur but only a part of her vision for that project was materialized.
During the archiving work a number of drawings of unbuilt houses was discovered. The purpose of this project is to do research on these drawings and make models of two of them: Gnitavegur 10 (now Gnitanes) in Skerjafjörður and Fjólugata 29 in The Westman Islands.