Wrapped Reichstag (Project for Berlin)

This work created during Christo's extensive planning for wrapping the Reichstag from 1971 to its actual installation in 1995, was created at a time when the city was divided and the sense of a contested urban topography are somewhat apparent in both. In the upper element, a map, one clearly sees a plan of the Reichstag and its proximity to what was then no man's land between east and west. The lower half shows the proposed, covered Reichstag standing ghostlike before grey, indistinct buildings stretching into the east.
With Wrapped Reichstag (Project for Berlin), one is invited to look at the defunct ruin anew. The building, merely a shell at that time, regains some of its original iconic status and dignity; a status it has since regained with Norman Foster's restoration and as home to the Bundestag. Consequently, these works constitute an interstice between the radical appropriation of urban space as it developed in the Seventies and a key period of European history. They are also representative of a moment in the development of an ambitious artwork, planned for a divided city which came to represent the equally ambitious aspirations of a newly united one.