Stockholm City Hall a golden treasure

Evert Taube, Sweden’s foremost musician, with Stockholm City Hall in the background

Looks can be deceiving and that’s just what Ragnar Östberg set out to do when he designed the iconic City Hall for Stockholm, the capital of Sweden.

Östberg, who won a competition in the early 1900s to create a new city hall, reworked his original designs throughout the entire construction period.

For starters, he added a 106-metre tower, which had been part of the original plan offered by Carl Westman, who came second in the competition. The top of the tower features three crowns from the Swedish coat of arms. He also added a lantern at the top and ditched his plans to have blue glazed tiles in what is still called the Blue Hall. That’s where the annual Nobel Prizes (except for the Peace Prize which is awarded in Norway) are awarded in December of each year. The organ in the Blue Hall, with its 10,270 pipes, is the largest in Scandinavia.

Internal courtyard

Towards the entrance

External courtyard

Doorway

Stockholm City Hall with tower

Many of Östberg’s tinkerings were done to make the structure look older than it really is. The eight million dark red bricks used in the construction are ‘munktegel’ (or monk’s bricks) that were traditionally used in the construction of churches and monasteries. After the bricks were in place, Östberg decided it was a good idea to have each brick roughed up so they looked more weathered. All that was done by hand, and contributed to a huge budget blow-out.

The columns in the arches are mix and match, reminiscent of times when materials from old buildings were removed and used in new ones.

Östberg’s efforts seem to have paid off. Our guide asked people in the group to guess how old the city hall was (we’d already read that it opened in 1923) and most of them speculated around 400 years old.

The overall design mixes several styles, blending North European, Venetian and Middle Eastern elements. The building surrounds internal and external courtyards, and overall is very effective.

Golden Hall, far wall

The highlight is the Golden Hall, named after the decorative mosaics made of more than 18 million small tiles. Our guide explained that the gold is 24-carat gold, but pounded so thinly that only about 10 kilos of gold was used in making all of them. The mosaics, designed by artist Einar Forseth, show people and events from Swedish history and legend, as well as images from the rest of the world. The room is 44 metres (144 feet) in height.

Assembly chamber

Assembly ceiling

Stockholm’s city council has 101 members—50 women and 51 men. The head of the council is a woman. The balance changes regularly. The previous council had 51 women and 50 men, with a man as the head.

Because the City Hall is a functioning government and administrative centre, you can visit only by guided tour. These run every hour and are offered in English and Swedish (and perhaps other languages by appointment). Certainly well worth a visit.

By the way, the City Hall is built on a place once occupied by an old mill, Eldkvarnen, that burned down in 1878.

Oh, and I should mention that one of the hallways has murals painted by the then prince. It took him five years and he was a bit fed up with the whole thing when he was done. Sorry there are no photos of it, but the sun cast such long shadows, I couldn’t do any of the panels justice.