ABSTRACT
Stockholm’s City Hall is probably the most famous town hall of the twentieth century. Ragnar Ostberg’s dramatic response to his waterfront site has become an iconic image not just of the city and indeed of Sweden, but of Scandinavia as a whole. The town hall’s case was being strongly promoted within the Council by Knut Agathon Wallenberg, then CEO of Stockholm’s Enskilda Bank, and he pressed his case by securing offers of private funding for the new building. Throughout the building, the level of detailing and craftsmanship is consistently high as masons, sculptors, bricklayers, metalworkers, painters, carpenters, joiners and plasterers drew on the Swedish vernacular and Norse mythology in an “elegant evocation of a mythical national past”. Like Martin Nyrop, Ostberg organised his town hall around two courtyards, one internal and one external, lying parallel to the water and entered from Stadshusbron on the landward side, but Ostberg’s asymmetrical composition has none of Nyrop’s strict axiality.
