In Reykjavik, a building that spent a century generating electricity now generates something harder to measure: wonder. Terta, the cultural centre for play and learning that now occupies a former power station, is one of the more instructive examples of what happens when a space is given permission to mean something different. The industrial bones remain. The emotional register has been completely transformed.
What Terta did — and what it teaches — is not really about architecture. It is about the relationship between space, colour, and the art that inhabits them. And that relationship is as relevant to a single room in a private home as it is to a century-old building in Iceland.
The Building That Changed Its Mind
The former power station that houses Terta was built in the early twentieth century, when Reykjavik was still a small city and electricity was a new and serious thing. The building was designed for function: thick walls, high ceilings, industrial materials, the kind of structural honesty that comes from buildings that have no reason to pretend to be anything other than what they are.
For most of its life, it generated power. Now, as reported by Dezeen, it generates something else entirely. Terta — the name means "cake" in Icelandic, a deliberate signal of sweetness and celebration — is a cultural centre oriented around play, learning, and the kind of joyful engagement that serious buildings rarely permit. The transformation involved colour, art, and a fundamental rethinking of what the space was for.
The result is a building that still looks like what it was, but feels like something completely different. That gap between appearance and experience is where the interesting question lives.
What Industrial Spaces Know About Atmosphere
There is a reason that so many of the world's most compelling art spaces occupy industrial buildings. The Tate Modern in London, Dia:Beacon in New York, countless galleries in converted warehouses and factories across every major city — the pattern is consistent enough to be worth examining.
Industrial buildings have qualities that purpose-built cultural spaces often lack. The ceilings are high enough to make you aware of the air above you. The materials are honest — brick, concrete, steel — in ways that create a specific quality of presence. The history is legible in the structure itself: you can see that this building has done serious work, that it has a life before the one it is living now. That history gives art something to push against, a context that makes the work feel more significant rather than less.
The white cube gallery — the neutral, windowless, climate-controlled box that became the dominant model for art display in the twentieth century — was designed to eliminate context, to make the art the only thing in the room. Industrial spaces do the opposite. They bring their own weight, their own character, their own emotional register. Art placed in them is in conversation with the space, not isolated from it. That conversation, when it works, produces something that neither the art nor the space could produce alone.
The Psychology of Colour in Space
Terta's most immediately striking decision was colour. Where the power station was grey and functional, the cultural centre is saturated and celebratory — a deliberate inversion of the building's original emotional register. This was not decoration. It was a psychological intervention.
Colour is one of the most direct tools available for changing how a space feels to inhabit. This is not a matter of taste or aesthetics — it is a matter of neuroscience. Different wavelengths of light produce measurably different physiological and psychological responses. Warm colours accelerate heart rate and increase alertness. Cool colours slow it. Saturated colours intensify emotional responses. Desaturated colours calm them. The choice of colour in a space is a choice about what kind of experience that space will produce.
Terta's saturated palette was chosen to produce a specific experience: playfulness, energy, the permission to engage without self-consciousness. It works because the colour is not applied randomly — it is used with intention, in service of the space's purpose. The same logic applies to the use of electric colour in neon surrealist art: the saturation is not decorative. It is expressive. It produces a specific psychological state in the viewer, one that cannot be produced by the same image rendered in muted tones.
This is the distinction that matters when thinking about colour in your own space. Colour chosen for coordination — to match the sofa, to complement the floor — is decoration. Colour chosen for its psychological effect — to change how the room feels to inhabit, to produce a specific emotional state in the people who spend time there — is something more serious. Terta understood this. The buildings that stay with you usually do.
Art as the Agent of Transformation
The transformation of Terta was not accomplished by architecture alone. The structural changes were significant, but what changed the building's emotional meaning was the art and colour that now inhabit it. This is a consistent pattern in the history of spaces that have been successfully transformed: the architecture creates the conditions, but the art completes the work.
A space without art is a container. A space with art is an environment — something that produces a specific experience in the people who move through it. The difference is not subtle. You feel it immediately when you enter a room where a work of genuine weight has been placed with intention. The room is different. Not because anything structural has changed, but because the art has given the space an emotional centre of gravity.
This is as true of a private room as it is of a converted power station. The scale is different. The principle is identical. A single work, chosen carefully and placed with attention to how it relates to the space around it, can change the emotional register of an entire room. It does not need to be large. It does not need to be expensive. It needs to have genuine weight — psychological content that the room can organise itself around.
Terta demonstrates this at architectural scale. The same logic applies at the scale of a bedroom wall, a living room, a study. The agent of transformation is the same. Only the square footage differs.
What This Means for Your Own Space
You do not need a century-old power station. You need a wall, a work, and the willingness to choose with intention rather than convenience.
Start with the wall that defines the room. Every room has one — the wall you face when you enter, or the wall opposite the place where you spend the most time. This is the wall that sets the room's emotional register. A work placed here with genuine weight will change how the entire room feels to inhabit. A work placed here without thought will simply fill the space.
Consider colour as a psychological tool, not a decorative one. Terta's transformation was accomplished partly through saturated colour used with intention. In a domestic space, this might mean a single work with electric colour on a dark wall — the contrast makes the colour appear to emit light, which changes the quality of the room's atmosphere in ways that are difficult to describe but immediately felt. For more on how dark walls and electric colour work together, see our guide to the neon aesthetic.
Think about the conversation between the art and the space. Industrial spaces work with art because the art has something to push against. In a domestic space, this means choosing a work that is in dialogue with the room's existing character — not matching it, but responding to it. A work that simply coordinates with the existing palette is decoration. A work that creates a productive tension with the space is transformation.
Give the transformation time. Terta did not become what it is overnight. The relationship between a space and the art that inhabits it develops over time. What you notice in the first week is not what you notice in the sixth month. The works worth choosing are the ones that continue to reveal themselves — that change as you change, that reward sustained attention rather than exhausting it. For more on choosing art that rewards the long relationship, see our guide to why people collect art.
For more on how the post-Dopamine Décor shift is changing how people think about colour and space, see our guide to after Dopamine Décor.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Terta in Iceland?
Terta is a cultural centre for play and learning in Reykjavik, Iceland, housed in a former power station that dates to the early twentieth century. The name means "cake" in Icelandic. The building was transformed from an industrial facility into a colourful, playful cultural space — a project that involved significant architectural intervention as well as a complete rethinking of the building's emotional register through colour and art. It was featured in Dezeen as an example of adaptive reuse and the transformation of industrial heritage.
How does colour affect how we experience a space?
Colour produces measurable physiological and psychological effects in the people who experience it. Warm, saturated colours tend to increase alertness and emotional intensity. Cool, desaturated colours tend to produce calm. The specific effects depend on the colour, its saturation, its relationship to the light in the space, and the context in which it appears. In interior design, colour is one of the most direct tools available for changing the emotional register of a space — more immediate in its effects than furniture, materials, or layout. Terta used colour to transform a space associated with industrial function into one associated with play and celebration. The same logic applies at any scale.
Can art really transform a room?
Yes — but the transformation depends on the quality of the choice. A work placed without intention will fill a wall. A work chosen for its psychological weight and placed with attention to how it relates to the space around it will change the room's emotional centre of gravity. The effect is immediate and cumulative: you feel it when you enter the room, and it deepens over time as your relationship to the work develops. The rooms that stay with you — the ones you remember long after you have left them — almost always have a work of art at their centre. That is not coincidence.
Cover image: Terta, Reykjavik. Photography via Dezeen.
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