Rotunda, third level

Meeting Room

“The form of every city hall expresses the dominant local ideas of civic power and authority at the time it was built.  All that is outside, also is inside [Was innen ist, ist außen], as Goethe observed of all forms.” — Bayard Coll

"Art was not morally neutral but worked in the service of virtue…  Ornament was not crime, but the addition of beauty and instruction to the satisfaction of material needs.  Art began precisely where utility broke off.  Form was not to follow function, but to transcend it. Any evidence of restraint, understatement, or, worst of all, parsimony, will subvert its intention."  — Donald Olsen, The City as a Work of Art

"Not utility, but cultural self-projection"  — Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

"The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity." -- Lewis Mumford, The City in History

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