S_BilledeborgenKøbenhavnsRådhus_1905-2005

BLUE FLUTED CHINA Birgit Jørgensen, linen store assistant

»I show up fo r work very early in the morning to ensure that the coffee service is all ready fo r the fir s t meetings ...«

- How much porcelain are you in charge of? »1,600 cups and 1 ,280 dinner plates ...«

- . . . and how many soup plates? »Well, then I ’ll have to get hold o f my store book, ju s t a minute! - 5 0 0 soup plates. A n d an additional 1 ,400 small luncheon plates fo r standing receptions and buffets.« - A n d the porcelain is the blue fluted china from Royal Copenhagen? »Yes. Serv ing dishes, sauceboats, mustard pots, jugs fo r vinegar fo r the split pea soup w ith pork, candlesticks, ashtrays and the fine ly perforated porcelain fo r the Royal Table.«

- D idn ’t you say that you work in the linen store? »Indeed, and we do also have both table-cloths and napkins, but the

table-cloths are not as big nowadays as the old damask table-cloths o f a length o f 22 feet each. They have been cut up, and we rent many table-cloths from out o f the house. B u t the round cloth fo r the Roya l Table with insertions and lace, that one we launder and iron on the premises.«

(C onversation w ith AdW , April 2005)

GRANITE ANIMALS AND MASKS The City Hall and Anders Bundgaard’s sculptures

What in the world are polar bears in granite doing on the roof facing the City Hall Square? Or two roughly hewn walruses at the back entrance, for that matter? Asked directly in June 1898, Nyrop himself believed that sculptures like these might be just as decorative in an Atlantic sea-going nation like Denmark as any lion or sphinx, and that furthermore there were loads of sea-creatures depicted inside the building itself, anyway. Anders Bundgaard’s aggressive mer people standing guard at one of the side entrances to the City Hall have fishlike nostrils and beards for fins. More in keeping with city life, the heads over the corner seats by the City Hall Square feature mouths like those of crying street sellers with tongues resembling both coins and toads, symbolising avarice and coarse speech. On the embrasures of the four towers facing the four corners of the compass, the north wind is portrayed as a surly creature, the south wind as the mouth of a black, the west wind whistles through a flute-like mouth, while the wind from the north-east has a cold. Nyrop was not alone in reintroducing medieval creatures. When St. Pancras Station opened around 1870, London had a modern neo-Gothic centre of traffic,

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