Overview
About Perlan Museum
A dome above water tanks
Architect Ingimundur Sveinsson designed Perlan, which opened on 21 June 1991. A large glass dome sits above six cylindrical district-heating tanks, each designed to hold approximately four million litres of geothermal water. The name means The Pearl. Its familiar silhouette is therefore also a record of the infrastructure behind Reykjavík’s use of hot water, combining an everyday municipal function with a prominent public building.
Why Öskjuhlíð mattered
The first heating tank was built on Öskjuhlíð in 1939. Its elevation helped provide pressure for distributing hot water through the city. More tanks followed, and the older structures were rebuilt in the late 1980s before Perlan took shape. The hill also preserves traces of glacial erosion, linking the building’s geothermal story with an older geological landscape. Perlan’s official history places these engineering and natural histories alongside the development of the landmark.
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