Iceland’s penis-shaped mall withstands hard times and continues to thrive. It’s the country’s largest and most unusual shopping center by far.
By DAN SEITZ
If there’s one thing we can safely say about Icelanders, it’s that, for some reason, they’re obsessed with the penis. They have the world’s first, and we hope only, phallus museum, and then there’s this mall, better known as Smaralind, which is . . . phallic in construction, to say the least, as you can see in the accompanying photo.
It gets better: it’s also the biggest mall in Iceland. Yes, Iceland’s monument to consumerism is also an enormous penis. We’re thinking that maybe the cold weather and long nights kind of get to you after a while.
Brainchild of the Baugur Group
This particular erection (as in “building”) got started more than a decade and a half ago with the Baugur Group. A huge investment company, Baugur spent a fortune in the first decade of the 2000s buying up various fashion brands by essentially borrowing lots of money and buying companies on credit, mostly clothing stores from the United Kingdom. This probably isn’t the first time a phallus-obsessed group has shown an unnerving interest in women’s clothes, but definitely the first time it manifested in financial markets.
Baugur bought brands like French Connection and Saks, crown jewels in the fashion retailing world. And, proud of what they’d put up, they wanted a place in Iceland to show off all their fancy stores, not to mention sell a lot of clothes, since they were leveraged to the eyeballs. Hence Smaralind, the Penis Mall, was built.
The idea was “three floors of entertainment,” which, if you think about it, it really is, just not in the way they meant. In addition to fashion shops, it had all the features of any good mall: live music venues, a good movie theater, and coffee shops. The idea was that you’d enter and spend the whole day buying their clothes, watching movies, and not pretending that you were in “Fantastic Voyage” and had accidentally been injected into the urethra by mistake.
So, plans were drawn up, shops rented, and a building built, all without anybody at Baugur, who we remind you were actually paying for this thing, glancing at the blueprints at any point and saying “You know, that looks a bit like a penis. Maybe we should fix that?” As for the architects, they are either incredibly naive, or very, very good at keeping a straight face, because they claim the shape is entirely unintentional. In no way, they claim, did they ever intend to put an enormous penis smack in the middle of Iceland’s capital city. Nobody won 20 bucks on any sort of bet they could pull this off.
Unfortunately for the Baugur Group, the market went soft and they collapsed, and the Penis Mall was sold off by their creditors. Fortunately for the rest of the world, the Penis Mall is still open and still operating, and ready to sell you clothes and the latest of Iceland’s fine products.
For all the ridiculousness of its architecture, Smaralind is actually a fairly serious mall. In addition to the Icelandic chains nobody outside of Iceland has ever heard of, it’s got stores like H&M, Body Shop, Levi’s, and Ecco. Even better, it’s still in operation: the Penis Mall is ready and willing for any business it can get. So come over to Iceland and visit. Just be sure to leave a tip. You can find directions at Smaralind’s official website.
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