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Around the turn of the 20th century, new city halls began to spring up around Scandinavia. Local governments attempted to use modern architecture to express their social ideals—and to one-up each other—achieving varying levels of success. In the process, they developed a new style: national romanticism.
The first of the three main modern city halls to be built in Scandinavia was Nyrop’s in Copenhagen. The old city hall was built in 1815 in a classical style. Nyrop rejected the idea that he should simply follow the rest of Europe in copying the classical style and designed a decidedly Scandinavian building, interpreting the indigenous architecture of Denmark. I feel that Nyrop was successful in his attempt to eschew classicism, especially considering that this was an early step in the movement. His use of local materials and the Gothic language, which had originated in northern Europe, give the building a true local stateliness, rather than the imported importance of classicism.
In Stockholm, sixteen years later, Ragnar Östberg designed a city hall that pushed the envelope even further. Östberg had two goals in the design of this building. He wanted to make the city hall a place for the people of Stockholm, and he wanted to make the design modern to show that the city was very progressive—even moreso than Copenhagen.
Östberg accomplished both of these goals by the same means. He created a courtyard in the center of the building, as was customary and necessary in buildings of this size at the time. But rather than keeping the courtyard closed off, which would make the building seem like a fortress guarding the courtyard’s sanctuary, Östberg made the entire waterfront façade permeable. He put an arcade stretching the entire length of the building, making the courtyard open to all the people of Stockholm, and inviting them further into the city hall.
The third city hall, built in Oslo by Arneberg and Poulsson, is the most radically modernist of the three, even moving toward the Bauhaus. The Oslo City Hall was built with the same goals as Stockholm’s, but the architects needed to go even further to one-up both Copenhagen and Stockholm. Here, the architects used the two flanking towers and a waterfall cascading off of the roof to welcome and draw people into the building. Whereas the Copenhagen City Hall used local materials and styling, in Oslo entire rooms were devoted to local styles, making it a showcase of Norwegian artistry. Rather than one simple clock tower as in the other two buildings, here two giant office blocks were constructed. Arneberg and Poulsson made the building even more modernist than Östberg, using a strictly rectilinear geometry and creating vast expanses of simply patterned monochromatic brick.
In these three city halls it is plain to see the progression of the national romantic style and the successes of their respective architects in their aspirations.
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