Challenge Accepted!
While in Copenhagen, we decided to visit city hall to learn more about the city and how things are run. We found out that a tour was available and thought that would be better than just wandering around the building aimlessly and wondering what we were looking at. If you ever visit Copenhagen, we highly recommend taking this excellent tour! Our guide was Martin and he did a great job of packing a lot of great information in the limited time he had to work with. One of the things Martin mentioned was that the architect of the building did not want to anger God by making anything about the building "perfect" because only God can create perfection. For this reason, each room and area in the building has a least one intentional flaw. Martin showed us the first example of this in the main hall. The hall is ringed with notable events in the city's history and each event is divided by a green wreath with four sets of red slashes on them. Here is an example of the wreaths:
Near the end of the events, if you look closely, you will notice that one of the wreaths is not like the others. This imperfection is the flaw for this area:
Another example of this is in the banquet hall. An area on the wall that commemorates Danish territories, past and present. For Greenland, there are a couple of walrus skulls on plaques. On each side of the plaques are rods with thick and thin gold rings on them.
Starting from the bottom of each rod there are three thin gold rings and one thick gold ring. If you look closely at the second rod from the left, there is a second thick gold ring that is not found on the other rods. Martin is proud of this particular flaw because he was the first one to find it. He found it after working at city hall for 12 years and said it made him feel more like a "real" city hall employee.
After the tour was complete, Jacque and I walked around to see more of the incredible craftsmanship throughout the building. I was also curious to know if I could find any flaws before we had to leave. I noticed a lot of the three towers with the sun and crescent moon in the air between them. Here are some examples of what I was seeing:
The gold towers in the image above were seen by Jacque on a spiral staircase to the left as you enter the main hall. As we were leaving I decided to see if there was a staircase to the right and there was. When I inspected the three towers on this staircase, I was excited to find a flaw! Here is what I found:
The sun and the crescent moon are transposed in this depiction of the three towers. Since I was able to find it within an hour of searching, I am pretty sure many others have found it as well but it is still satisfying. Also, as I was searching through our pictures, looking for examples of the sun and crescent moon I found another flaw. On the northeast side of the build is a beautiful staircase with an intricately carved handrail. It is called The People's Staircase and the carvings show the everyday people that helped make the city hall building a reality. At the very top of the staircase, on the ceiling, is this gorgeous city crest.
The flaw here is the crescent moon. As I reviewed all the images we have of the three towers with the sun and the crescent moon I realized that it opens to the left except in this crest. I believe the crescent moon opening to the right is an intentional flaw. The next time we are at the city hall in Copenhagen, I will see if this flaw has been discovered before.