Stockholm City Hall

This guide to Stockholm City Hall works out how just ten kilos of gold could cover an entire hall floor to ceiling, and follows the Berlin goldsmiths and the firm Puhl and Wagner who beat it into leaf and set it onto glass tiles between 1921 and 1923. You'll hear how artist Einar Forseth designed the scheme, and how the wider building told the same story of ballooning costs, with architect Ragnar Oestberg's eight million hand-shaped bricks taking twelve years and roughly triple the original budget. Listen for the detail about the patron saint hidden in the mosaic, high on one wall.