Stockholm City Hall is inaugurated
Ragnar Östberg’s City Hall is inaugurated on Midsummer Eve 1923, after more than twenty years of work. It is built of handmade brick with craftsmanship from all over the country.
The City Hall became the high point of National Romanticism – and its last great work.
The City of Stockholm had long lacked a building of its own for its administration and elected representatives. Around 1900 a competition was held for a new courthouse, and the site was the tip of Kungsholmen facing Riddarfjärden, where a mill had once stood. Ragnar Östberg won, but the plans changed, and the courthouse was moved to another site while Östberg was commissioned to design a city hall on the point. The period was marked by National Romanticism. The dissolution of the union with Norway in 1905 and a growing national self-confidence led architects to turn to native materials and historical models, such as the Vasa castles and the medieval churches. Östberg also drew on impressions from Venice, where the Doge’s Palace rises from the water in the same way.
Construction began in 1911 and lasted twelve years, while Östberg constantly altered and refined the drawings. The building was constructed of red handmade brick around two courtyards, and the tower, with the three crowns at its top, rises more than a hundred metres beside the water. The Blue Hall was originally meant to be rendered blue, but Östberg liked the brick and left it exposed, while the name stuck. In the Golden Hall, Einar Forseth covered the walls with gold mosaic, and Prince Eugen painted frescoes in the gallery facing Lake Mälaren. Artists and craftsmen from all over the country contributed wrought iron, joinery, textiles and stone. The inauguration on Midsummer Eve 1923 fell four hundred years after Gustav Vasa’s entry into Stockholm.
The City Hall attracted a great deal of attention abroad, not least in Britain, and Östberg was awarded the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1926. But in Sweden the times were already moving elsewhere. Just seven years after the inauguration, the Stockholm Exhibition presented an architecture that was the opposite of Östberg’s: light, open and industrial. The City Hall therefore came to stand as the last great monument of National Romanticism. Forseth’s mosaics, with the enthroned Queen of Lake Mälaren, were criticised by some as too Byzantine. Over time the building has become one of Stockholm’s most recognisable symbols. Since 1930 the Nobel Banquet has been held in the Blue Hall, and the building is still the seat of the city council.