The City Hall Stockholm is unremarkable from the outside: it looks industrial with its red bricks and a towering chimney stack. How wrong I was.
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| The City Hall, Stockholm, seen from the Old Town |
Visits to the inside is on guided tours only, and the municipality is doing a roaring trade. There is a constant stream of coaches disgorging yet more tourists. Oh what a circus.
On entry, one is immediately captivated by the spaciousness of the internal courtyard, built like a grand Italian piazza. It was called Blue Hall until the architect changed his mind but the name stuck. Here the guide told us of the handmade bricks that are used in the interiors and the mass-produced bricks that are used in the exterior. For the Swedes who are used to open spaces, such a vast area apparently is too small for the purpose. But it is big enough to host the Nobel Prize dinner. And the guide told us about the lottery to win a ticket to the dinner, with the winner having to pay for the tickets after winning the "lottery". Only in an egalitarian society like Sweden are such occasions open to the public, lottery or no lottery.
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| The enormous Blue Hall where the Nobel Prize banquets take place No longer blue by order of the architect who liked the brick work so much! |
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| The grand organ inside City Hall, a unique shape not seen elsewhere in Europe |
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| The Council Chamber, City Hall, Stockholm |
The most sumptuous room is the Golden Hall where the dancing takes place after the Nobel Prize dinner. Enough said about the 18 million pieces of mosaic tiles that were made in Italy and then assembled in Germany. The finished work is truly magnificent. It beats all the mosaics that I saw in Rome and elsewhere. Imagine gliding on a marble floor in a pool of golden light, dancing the night away.
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| A small part of the mosaics in the Golden Hall, City Hall, Stockholm |
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| From the outside, City Hall, Stockholm Note the arched columns, with view to the waters. Building, waters - that's Stockholm |
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| The beautiful city that is Stockholm |
