History
The building was officially opened on 8 April 1930. However it had been partially occupied since 1927. In 1969 the council commenced the acquisition of the properties to the south of the City Hall, and in 1975 opened the Brisbane Administration Centre (or BAC), a 20 floor tower and surrounding plaza. Most of the Council's offices then moved from the City hall to the BAC. Until the opening of the new Brisbane Square in December 2006, the City Hall continued to house the office of the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, which was previously located on the first level of the King George Square side of the building. The Council Chambers (located on the Adelaide Street side of the building), and councillors' offices, remain however in City Hall.
In the 1980s work commenced on the full-scale restoration of the building, opening up the side entrance vestibules and restoring a number of the reception rooms to their original design. These reception rooms are named for former local government areas subsumed into Greater Brisbane in 1925, such as the Sherwood Room, or the Ithaca Room. From 2003 the Museum of Brisbane (which has galleries positioned on both sides of the building's entrance from King George Square) has replaced administration offices.
Read more about this topic: Brisbane City Hall
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“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)