A small, plain neoclassical building of dressed grey basalt on the south side of Austurvöllur square, the Parliament House looks more like a provincial municipal hall than the seat of national legislature. The architect Ferdinand Meldahl finished it in 1881; before that, the Althing — which had moved off and on between Þingvellir, Reykjavik, and Copenhagen for nine hundred years — had no permanent home.
The building is rarely open to the public except on the National Day (17 June), but its understatement is part of the point. The Icelandic political style — informal, on first-name terms, with members on bicycles — fits it.