Likening the interior of a city hall – the ultimate monument to municipal democracy – to Piranesi’s sketches of imaginary prisons might not suggest a particularly felicitous encounter with it. But entering the section of the new Kiruna city hall that’s open to the public isn’t so different from trying to work out the spatial complexities of the Italian’s architectural visions.
Set atop and inside the building containing the government of Sweden’s northernmost city, located 145 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, is a host of seemingly haphazard gold cubes. Besides housing an art museum, they add some much-needed complexity to the geometrically simple structure, whose round shape is a fitting symbol for the...
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While Henning Larsen North Atlantic completed a new town hall in the Faroe Islands, the Copenhagen-based home office was fashioning one for Sweden’s northernmost city. The outcome is more than a civic building: It’s the optimistic emblem of an uprooted community