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perception of art and culture between 1800 and 1900 in a most vivid manner.
On the other hand, one does occasionally get a feeling of being in a curiosity
shop when walking round in the building. One may sense an atmosphere of
German city hall vaults, sounds of revelry and jovial apothegms on the wooden
cross bars, combined with a heretical sense of bric-a-brac in all the ornamentation
and decoration. During such fits the busts of famous men seem transformed into
oversized garden gnomes, and the careful ornamentation into the nauseating
kitsch of bourgeois leaded windows.
Maybe this is caused by Martin Nyrop’s stubborn and firm grip on all choices
that were involved with aesthetic aspects: the picturesque details of the building,
his own design of lamps and door handles, and his choice of artists to decorate
the walls and corners, the cornices and gate reliefs, all controlled by symbolic,
indeed almost instructive, pictographic ideas regarding motifs.
As pointed out in this book, Copenhagen City Hall is simultaneously a likeable,
beautiful and sensible building, but Nyrop himself knew very well, where the
problem lay:
»Is it not making too much of the details? And will it not feed the opinion that
these ‘ideas’ and ‘whimsicalities’ have been the most important to me, contributing
the only value of the building, though in fact it may be precisely those that will
make people find the building trivial and commonplace.«
RECEPTIONS
Alfred Wassard, Mayor, the Fourth Department, 1962-78,
m ember of Copenhagen City Council for
the Conservative Party from 1943
Copenhagen City Hall has frequently had visits from foreign heads of states and
displays much hospitality on such occasions in order to give the visitors a good
impression of our country and a chance to meet the people of Copenhagen and have
an informal chat with them.
Such receptions take place when our own majesty accompanies the visitors, and the
receptions follow a very specific ritual in the magnificent Banqueting Hall on the
second floor. When the visitor, with spouse, has been received in the Aiain Hall on the
ground floor, while two musicians blow a welcome call on the old lures, the visitors are
escorted up the two flights of the Burghers’Stairs. Here all the notabilities of
Copenhagen and a great entourage of members of the Danish royal family are waiting.
Together with the Qiieen and the Prince Consort the visitors are asked to take a seat
on the gilt chairs on the dais placed at the middle of the long wall. Here the chairs are
positioned under a canopy with a tapestry behind. This is inspired by the word
Denmark’ (indeed, its formal name is the Denmark Tapestry), and it is adorned with
the coats of arms of the city and the realm plus allusions to poems and stories about
Denmark.
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