The city hall is an ancient building type, its origins found at least as far back as the
classical Greek bouleutrion, the assembly chamber of the city-state. In medieval Europe the city hall
took on a number of auxiliary spaces that complemented the council chamber, such as
market halls, office spaces, and social rooms. Some, such as the Palazzo Pubblico in
Siena or the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, celebrated the corporate identity of the
independent city with soaring towers and instructive works of art. As cities grew in size
and administrative complexity, their city halls grew ever larger and assumed a
prominence in the urban form of their cities that rivaled only the greatest sacred edifices.
By the end of the 19th century, enormous piles, such as Alfred Waterhouse’s Manchester
Town Hall (1867–77) and John McArthur’s Philadelphia City Hall (1871–1901), marked
the seats of municipal authority with complex historical allusions and equally convoluted
silhouettes.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was unquestioned that a building typology as
representational as a city hall would be expressed in a historical style. In northern Europe
this historicism often meant an investigation of medieval forms, as the type was closely
associated with its medieval antecedents and the National Romantic movement. Martin
Nyrop’s Copenhagen Town Hall (1892–1905) was the most significant example of the
northern European city hall and a primary inspiration for Ragnar Östberg’s Stockholm
City Hall (1911–23), which fused medieval and Renaissance detailing with an extensive
art program. In more southern nations, Renaissance and baroque models were often
emulated. Contemporaneous city halls in the United Kingdom often interpreted the
baroque. A.Brumwell Thomas appropriated Wren’s vocabulary at St. Paul’s to create his
grand but rather literal Belfast City Hall (1897–1906), and John Belcher’s Colchester
City Hall (1897–1902) did much to establish the English “free baroque.” Across the
English Channel, the influential French architect and theorist Victor Laloux built several
city halls modeled on those of the 17th century; his hôtel de ville (1898–1900) at Tours inspired
several interpretations across the Atlantic.
In the United States many cities had built their city halls in the 1880s and 1890s, when
the Richardsonian Romanesque style suited the desirable images of permanence and
monumentality. Later, the civic improvement movement known as the City Beautiful
encouraged many cities to build new city halls as the centerpiece of a multistructure civic
center modeled on the “White City” of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in
Chicago. The most complete and successful of these efforts was built after the great
earthquake and fire of San Francisco (1906); Bakewell and Brown’s City Hall (1912–16)
dominates the 15-block Civic Center with a 300-foot-high dome sometimes described as
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 500
a Doric fusion of those of Hardouin-Mansart and Michelangelo. The skyscraper as city
hall was first executed across the bay in Oakland, California, where Palmer and
Hornbostel won a competition with a 14-story tower in 1911. The skyscraper idiom
became more common in the 1920s and is best exemplified by Austin, Martin and
Parkinson’s Los Angeles City Hall, a severe classical tower, and G.Lloyd Preacher’s
Gothic skyscraper Atlanta City Hall (1928–30); Art Deco forms dominated the 1930s—
Dietel and Wade and Sullivan Jones’ Buffalo City Hall remains an important American
example of this international movement. In some locales regionally important revival
styles were employed to reinforce the city’s past or to promote an idealized fictive past;
Bakewell and Brown’s Pasadena City Hall (1923–27) was an amalgamation of
Mediterranean sources intended to evoke a Spanish heritage that the community did not
actually possess.
The emergence of the Modern movement in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s was not
often evidenced in city halls, largely because few new city hall projects were initiated
between the wars and because the political nature of the type nearly precluded
experimental form. Several notable exceptions were built. Willem Dudock’s Town Hall
(1924–30) for Hilversum, the Netherlands, is well known. Dudock contrasted several
austere horizontal masses, including a primary volume containing the council chamber,
with a soaring tower. Each mass interlocked with several others and yet remained
distinctly legible, the assembly presenting a balanced composition in repose. Fritz
Höger’s Town Hall (1928–30) for Rüstringen, Germany, exemplified his interest in
dramatic geometric form within the limitations of brick masonry; the ceremonial entry
and council chamber are marked by an enormous 12-story tower, a pure solid broken
only by a series of vertical fins and a clock tower on the primary elevation.
After World War II a large number of city centers in Europe required complete
rebuilding. Naturally enough, in many places city halls were repaired or even
reconstructed in order to preserve a continuity with prewar civic life. Some cities,
particularly in Germany, adapted surviving structures to a new civic purpose, with the
intention to build a representational structure at some time in the future. Most of the
continent’s new city halls were modern in orientation. Perhaps the most famous are those
by Alvar Aalto, whose civic complexes for Säynätsalo (1950–52) and Seinajöki (1952–
66) wove the town hall and auxiliary build-ings into the landscape and demonstrated as
much concern for the space between the buildings as for the buildings themselves. At
Seinajöki the city hall is marked by its axial siting within the civic center and by a
commanding monitor roof through which light pours into the council chamber.
American postwar city halls came in two forms: the unassuming suburban
multipurpose civic building, which usually was designed on a decidedly
domestic scale, and the overscaled, inner-city modernist monument, which
usually served as the centerpiece of a large urban-renewal scheme. The
former conception, city hall as ranch house or colonial farmstead,
successfully served those residential communities that lacked a
commercial center or a long civic tradition. The success of the second
movement, the city hall as civic savior, has proven more troublesome, if
only because so much more was at stake. Perhaps definitive of this latter
Entries A–F 501
form, Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles’ Boston City Hall (1963–69)
commands its cleared plaza and the 18th- and early 19th-century harbor
below it like a citadel. Although one can read the jumble of fenestration on
the harbor elevation for a clue as to the location of the mayor’s suite and
the council chambers, much of the public’s interaction with its municipal
government is forced underground into several floors of bureaucratic
offices below grade. This loss of dignified purpose continued into the late
20th century, in which many newer Sunbelt cities constructed city halls
and civic campuses indistinguishable from the suburban business parks and hotel slabs that surround them.
At the end of the 20th century, the city hall regained its significance in architectural
discourse, although not without some concern about the overwhelming scale that the
modern city hall often possesses. Richard Meier’s city halls restored the type to the center
of urban life, but they did so without comment on the local architectural dialect. In The
Hague (1987–95), Meier organized three colossal slabs of office space about an equally
enormous atrium, creating within the city hall a public realm that functions independently
of the often damp Dutch climate. One corner of the complex is punctuated by the
cylindrical mass of the public library, a form that is repeated within the atrium at the
council chamber; both are subordinated to the experience of the atrium, whose precise
detail and sublime scale transport the viewer beyond the day-to-day life of the city.
Scale is again of paramount importance with Kenzo Tange’s City Hall (1989–95) for
Tokyo. This complex, spread over three blocks of the Shinjuku subcenter, is composed of
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 502
two tower groups and an assembly building linked to the towers by skywalks. The
axiality and geometric rigor of the plan recall the Beaux-Arts conceptions of the
beginning of the century, even as the elevations refer to both traditional Japanese postand-
beam construction and modern integrated circuit boards. The orthogonal grids set up
by the office tower blocks are complemented by the radial framework of the assembly
building, whose sweeping hemicycle embraces a fan-shaped court reminiscent of the
Piazza del Campo in Siena. The elliptical assembly hall is situated on axis to this court,
elevated to the seventh floor, and in fact breaks the plane of the hemicycle to announce
its presence. In his design Tange provides both a usable public space and an identifiable
seat of authority (the council chamber) within a comprehensible assembly of office
towers and stratified circulation. This synthesis of Western and native traditions
represents a culmination of the typology in the 20th century and might serve as a worthy
starting point for the city halls of the next.
classical Greek bouleutrion, the assembly chamber of the city-state. In medieval Europe the city hall
took on a number of auxiliary spaces that complemented the council chamber, such as
market halls, office spaces, and social rooms. Some, such as the Palazzo Pubblico in
Siena or the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, celebrated the corporate identity of the
independent city with soaring towers and instructive works of art. As cities grew in size
and administrative complexity, their city halls grew ever larger and assumed a
prominence in the urban form of their cities that rivaled only the greatest sacred edifices.
By the end of the 19th century, enormous piles, such as Alfred Waterhouse’s Manchester
Town Hall (1867–77) and John McArthur’s Philadelphia City Hall (1871–1901), marked
the seats of municipal authority with complex historical allusions and equally convoluted
silhouettes.
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was unquestioned that a building typology as
representational as a city hall would be expressed in a historical style. In northern Europe
this historicism often meant an investigation of medieval forms, as the type was closely
associated with its medieval antecedents and the National Romantic movement. Martin
Nyrop’s Copenhagen Town Hall (1892–1905) was the most significant example of the
northern European city hall and a primary inspiration for Ragnar Östberg’s Stockholm
City Hall (1911–23), which fused medieval and Renaissance detailing with an extensive
art program. In more southern nations, Renaissance and baroque models were often
emulated. Contemporaneous city halls in the United Kingdom often interpreted the
baroque. A.Brumwell Thomas appropriated Wren’s vocabulary at St. Paul’s to create his
grand but rather literal Belfast City Hall (1897–1906), and John Belcher’s Colchester
City Hall (1897–1902) did much to establish the English “free baroque.” Across the
English Channel, the influential French architect and theorist Victor Laloux built several
city halls modeled on those of the 17th century; his hôtel de ville (1898–1900) at Tours inspired
several interpretations across the Atlantic.
In the United States many cities had built their city halls in the 1880s and 1890s, when
the Richardsonian Romanesque style suited the desirable images of permanence and
monumentality. Later, the civic improvement movement known as the City Beautiful
encouraged many cities to build new city halls as the centerpiece of a multistructure civic
center modeled on the “White City” of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in
Chicago. The most complete and successful of these efforts was built after the great
earthquake and fire of San Francisco (1906); Bakewell and Brown’s City Hall (1912–16)
dominates the 15-block Civic Center with a 300-foot-high dome sometimes described as
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 500
a Doric fusion of those of Hardouin-Mansart and Michelangelo. The skyscraper as city
hall was first executed across the bay in Oakland, California, where Palmer and
Hornbostel won a competition with a 14-story tower in 1911. The skyscraper idiom
became more common in the 1920s and is best exemplified by Austin, Martin and
Parkinson’s Los Angeles City Hall, a severe classical tower, and G.Lloyd Preacher’s
Gothic skyscraper Atlanta City Hall (1928–30); Art Deco forms dominated the 1930s—
Dietel and Wade and Sullivan Jones’ Buffalo City Hall remains an important American
example of this international movement. In some locales regionally important revival
styles were employed to reinforce the city’s past or to promote an idealized fictive past;
Bakewell and Brown’s Pasadena City Hall (1923–27) was an amalgamation of
Mediterranean sources intended to evoke a Spanish heritage that the community did not
actually possess.
The emergence of the Modern movement in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s was not
often evidenced in city halls, largely because few new city hall projects were initiated
between the wars and because the political nature of the type nearly precluded
experimental form. Several notable exceptions were built. Willem Dudock’s Town Hall
(1924–30) for Hilversum, the Netherlands, is well known. Dudock contrasted several
austere horizontal masses, including a primary volume containing the council chamber,
with a soaring tower. Each mass interlocked with several others and yet remained
distinctly legible, the assembly presenting a balanced composition in repose. Fritz
Höger’s Town Hall (1928–30) for Rüstringen, Germany, exemplified his interest in
dramatic geometric form within the limitations of brick masonry; the ceremonial entry
and council chamber are marked by an enormous 12-story tower, a pure solid broken
only by a series of vertical fins and a clock tower on the primary elevation.
After World War II a large number of city centers in Europe required complete
rebuilding. Naturally enough, in many places city halls were repaired or even
reconstructed in order to preserve a continuity with prewar civic life. Some cities,
particularly in Germany, adapted surviving structures to a new civic purpose, with the
intention to build a representational structure at some time in the future. Most of the
continent’s new city halls were modern in orientation. Perhaps the most famous are those
by Alvar Aalto, whose civic complexes for Säynätsalo (1950–52) and Seinajöki (1952–
66) wove the town hall and auxiliary build-ings into the landscape and demonstrated as
much concern for the space between the buildings as for the buildings themselves. At
Seinajöki the city hall is marked by its axial siting within the civic center and by a
commanding monitor roof through which light pours into the council chamber.
American postwar city halls came in two forms: the unassuming suburban
multipurpose civic building, which usually was designed on a decidedly
domestic scale, and the overscaled, inner-city modernist monument, which
usually served as the centerpiece of a large urban-renewal scheme. The
former conception, city hall as ranch house or colonial farmstead,
successfully served those residential communities that lacked a
commercial center or a long civic tradition. The success of the second
movement, the city hall as civic savior, has proven more troublesome, if
only because so much more was at stake. Perhaps definitive of this latter
Entries A–F 501
form, Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles’ Boston City Hall (1963–69)
commands its cleared plaza and the 18th- and early 19th-century harbor
below it like a citadel. Although one can read the jumble of fenestration on
the harbor elevation for a clue as to the location of the mayor’s suite and
the council chambers, much of the public’s interaction with its municipal
government is forced underground into several floors of bureaucratic
offices below grade. This loss of dignified purpose continued into the late
20th century, in which many newer Sunbelt cities constructed city halls
and civic campuses indistinguishable from the suburban business parks and hotel slabs that surround them.
At the end of the 20th century, the city hall regained its significance in architectural
discourse, although not without some concern about the overwhelming scale that the
modern city hall often possesses. Richard Meier’s city halls restored the type to the center
of urban life, but they did so without comment on the local architectural dialect. In The
Hague (1987–95), Meier organized three colossal slabs of office space about an equally
enormous atrium, creating within the city hall a public realm that functions independently
of the often damp Dutch climate. One corner of the complex is punctuated by the
cylindrical mass of the public library, a form that is repeated within the atrium at the
council chamber; both are subordinated to the experience of the atrium, whose precise
detail and sublime scale transport the viewer beyond the day-to-day life of the city.
Scale is again of paramount importance with Kenzo Tange’s City Hall (1989–95) for
Tokyo. This complex, spread over three blocks of the Shinjuku subcenter, is composed of
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 502
two tower groups and an assembly building linked to the towers by skywalks. The
axiality and geometric rigor of the plan recall the Beaux-Arts conceptions of the
beginning of the century, even as the elevations refer to both traditional Japanese postand-
beam construction and modern integrated circuit boards. The orthogonal grids set up
by the office tower blocks are complemented by the radial framework of the assembly
building, whose sweeping hemicycle embraces a fan-shaped court reminiscent of the
Piazza del Campo in Siena. The elliptical assembly hall is situated on axis to this court,
elevated to the seventh floor, and in fact breaks the plane of the hemicycle to announce
its presence. In his design Tange provides both a usable public space and an identifiable
seat of authority (the council chamber) within a comprehensible assembly of office
towers and stratified circulation. This synthesis of Western and native traditions
represents a culmination of the typology in the 20th century and might serve as a worthy
starting point for the city halls of the next.
