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The Culture House was built during the period 1906-1908 to house the
National Library and National Archives of Iceland and was opened to the
public in the spring of 1909. The building was also home to Iceland’s
National Museum and Natural History Museum for several decades. The Museum
Building, as it soon came to be called, thus housed for a long time all
the main treasures of the Icelandic nation under the same roof.
 The
first Minister of Iceland, Hannes Hafstein, was the main promoter of
the idea of raising such a building and selected a Danish architect,
Johannes Magdahl Nielsen, to design it. This magnificent building bears
witness to how well he succeeded. Magdahl Nielsen himself never set foot
in Iceland; instead, his colleague Frederick Kiörboe supervised
the construction on his behalf. He designed the oak furniture for use
in the Reading Room, now used in some of the meeting rooms of the building.
The Rotunda added to Parliament House is also his work.
On the exterior walls of the building are the names of eight leading
figures from Icelandic cultural and religious history and their dates.
They are: medieval historians Ari Þorgilsson and Snorri Sturluson,
bishop and bible translator Guðbrandur Þorláksson, hymnist
Hallgrímur Pétursson, annalist and historian Jón
Halldórsson, writer and Enlightenment scholar Eggert Ólafsson,
annalist Jón Espólín and literary scholar Sveinbjörn
Egilsson. Above the granite door frames of the building is a falcon crest
with a crown, the Icelandic coat of arms when the Culture House was built.
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