STOCKHOLM TOWN HALL.

Shannon News, 5 August 1924, Page 1

STOCKHOLM TOWN HALL.

A NEW WONDER OF EUROPE. "During the war the S"redes were busy building their magnificent town hall at Stockholm. Town hall is hardly the word. The building is a kind of Doge's palace of the nortai —the doge in this case being the council of an ambitious modern city; dreaming of beauty in common life as the Venetians dreamed of old," writes Mr. Hope Bagenal, A.R.1.8.A., in the '"Daily News." "Every citizen watched it growing upon the shores "of lake Malaren. Its architect, Ragnar Ostberg, a man of x'eal genius, had tihe active help of the best artists of Sweden, from Prince Eugene, the King's brother, to the most skilful bricklayer and clock maker.

"It has been scarcely completed a year, but it has already a kind of exquisite fame among the architects of Europe. The London Architectural Association has organised an exhibition of Swedish architecture at 9 Conduit Street (the R.1.8.A. galleries) which is now open to the public, and for this exhibition the Stockholm council voted a grant of £2OO to make a large model and send it express to London.

"In Scandinavian buildings the shipbuilding or Viking element is never quite civilised away, but in Ostberg's town hall a hundred turbulent ancestral motives are harmonised by a consummate art and made into a work of ordered architecture. Travellers continually report it as of an unaccountable joyfulness of aspect.

"Craftsmen are enchanted by its texture and carving, architects by its proportions. It stands, with a terraced garden between it and the lake, in a wine-dark brick of the large dimensions common in Scandinavia in mediaeval times. The roof is high and curved, and covered with large copper plates like those in- illuminated manuscripts; each plate was the gift of a citizen. A greati tower like a lighthouse stands at the angle of the site, and seems to,dominate earth and water. It is diminished upwards like a Grecian column in oTder exactly to satisfy tihe eye. "The interior of the .building is planned for civic entertainments as well as for municipal offices. The golden banqueting hall is a conscious rival, in its size and soft radiance, to the great sala of the Doge's palace. The large 'people's court' is a close through the arcades of which a view of the terrace gardens and the lake beyond is to be seen." „