Qualla: Copenhagen City Hall

Copenhagen City Hall: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Freepenguin, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the second floor of Copenhagen's city hall, behind glass, sits a clock with twelve dials and 1,433 individually machined parts that measures, among other things, the precession of the Earth's axis on a cycle of 25,753 years. Jens Olsen spent the last decade of his life designing it. He died in 1945, ten years before the clock was finished and switched on by King Frederick IX in 1955. The clock is in many ways the truest object in the building: a piece of patient, methodical Danish craftsmanship surrounded by the National Romantic brick and statuary of Martin Nyrop's 1905 Rådhus. The building is the sixth city hall Copenhagen has had. The five before it kept being moved or burning down or being rebuilt, all clustered around the old market squares of Gammeltorv and Nytorv. This is the only one with a clock that runs out a calendar twenty-five thousand years long.

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Image: Freepenguin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Copenhagen City Hall: Five Halls Before This One

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Björn Söderqvist from Taastrup, Denmark, CC BY-SA 2.0. Copenhagen has been keeping civic records since the medieval period, and somewhere near the old market square of Gammeltorv stood the first city hall, though almost nothing is known about it — not its appearance, not its exact location, not when it was built. The second was raise...

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Image: Björn Söderqvist from Taastrup, Denmark | CC BY-SA 2.0

Copenhagen City Hall: Nyrop and the National Romantic

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Scythian, CC BY-SA 3.0. After an architectural competition, Martin Nyrop won the commission to design Copenhagen's sixth city hall. Construction began in 1892 and took thirteen years; the building was inaugurated on 12 September 1905. Nyrop chose the National Romantic style, which in Denmark meant a ret...

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Image: Scythian | CC BY-SA 3.0

Copenhagen City Hall: The Clock That Runs for Twenty-Five Thousand Years

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Leif Jørgensen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Jens Olsen was a Danish locksmith and astronomer who began designing his world clock in 1928. He worked on it for sixteen years and spent the last decade of his life on the calculations. He died in November 1945. The clock was finally completed in 1955 and inaugurated by King Fre...

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Image: Leif Jørgensen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Copenhagen City Hall: Copenhagen on the Big Screen and the Small

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Brown, CC BY 2.0. The Rådhus has had a quiet but persistent role in Danish popular culture. In the 1978 comedy Olsen-banden går i krig — the tenth film in the much-loved Olsen Gang series — Egon Olsen ends up tied up outside the city hall tower clock, a sequence Danes still recite from memory. In ...

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Image: Chris Brown | CC BY 2.0