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(Male Narrator): Understanding City Hall’s original design was not easy for the heritage architects.
All of the original photos of the building are in black and white.
But as painstaking as it was, this research was an essential first step before making decisions about
the new colour schemes and the fabrics to decorate the newly restored City Hall.
(Female worker 1): We certainly spent a lot of time examining the original drawings and also early photographs of
the building that indicated the sorts of colours that were used.
There are subtleties in the colour scheme that we’ve chosen but we’ve definitely tried to have a
pallet through the whole building and not have different colours in every room.
Certainly, the early photographs that we’ve looked at don’t have multi-coloured paint schemes in the building
so we’ve tried really hard to keep it much more subtle and I guess much more sophisticated, too.
(Male Narrator): Selecting the new paint schemes was much more involved than just looking through colour charts.
(Female worker 2): We’ve really gone back to the original intent of the building, pretty much in every way,
as much as we could so we have fairly understated colours that really accentuate the great details and architecture of the building;
the lovely stone that has been used, the joinery, leadlight was done by local artists and some of the bronze ceilings as well.
(Male Narrator): In recreating City Hall’s original 1920s design, efforts have been made to recreate fabrics that have been long since removed.
(Female worker 2): We have a wonderful photograph, in particular, black and white unfortunately, but we could see what the pattern of that carpet was.
It’s actually very large space and it was one massive rug which we could just see in the detailing of the, in the photograph.
We have been able to take a lot of the detail and get it reasonably accurate;
it’s not exactly the same but it’s reasonably accurate.
And then we had to guess the colours pretty much because they were black and white photographs
and we made the colours suit the new functions as well as being along similar lines to what it would have been.
(Male Narrator): And what do the heritage architects hope you’ll notice about City Hall when it reopens?
(Female worker 1): The colour scheme really accentuates the architectural qualities and
I feel that the Auditorium is something that will blow everybody’s socks off.
Everybody in Brisbane, if they have a chance, should take that opportunity to come and see what’s happened in the building.
I think they’ll be - they’ll be really amazed.
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