THE REICHSTAG, built in 1894 in Berlin, is the huge, historic home of Germany’s parliament. When it was set ablaze in 1933, Hitler used the fire as a pretext for seizing power. The building was almost destroyed again in 1945 during the Russian battle for Berlin, and then eventually restored in the 1960s. In 1991, two years after the Berlin Wall fell, the German parliament sitting in Bonn decided that the Reichstag should once again house the legislature of the newly reunified nation. Redevelopment of the building will begin in July.
But before the contractors move in, an artist known simply as Christo is going to wrap up the Reichstag like a giant parcel. Over six days in mid-June, he plans to marshal a team of several hundred people to drape 75 000 square metres of aluminium-coated polypropylene over the building and loosely tie it up with 8 kilometres of blue binding. The resulting work of art will be short-lived, but during its brief existence is expected to attract four million extra visitors to Berlin.
“For two weeks the richness of the silvery fabric, shaped by the blue ropes, will create a sumptuous flow of vertical folds highlighting the features and proportions of the imposing structure, revealing the essence of the Reichstag,” says Christo. The work’s “quality of impermanence”, he adds, will challenge the immortality of art.
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To meet the architectural and engineering challenges, Christo has hired materials scientists, structural engineers and other specialists to design, test and plan the operation. Early next month he travels to London to tell an audience at the Royal Academy all about the event.
Christo, a 59-year-old Bulgarian artist who lives in New York, has spent much of his life wrapping up the animate and the inanimate. He started with a woman in London in 1962, then went for a tree at Eindhoven in the Netherlands, a fountain and a medieval tower at Spoleto in Italy, an art gallery in Bern, Switzerland, and another in Chicago. As his fame spread, he became more ambitious. In 1969, Christo wrapped part of the Australian coastline near Sydney in 93 000 square metres of fabric. The following year he wrapped two famous monuments in Milan, then part of the ancient Roman wall in Rome, then 5.5 kilometres of paths in Kansas City. In 1985, most famously of all, he wrapped the mighty Pont Neuf in Paris in 41 000 square metres of nylon.
Christo does not limit himself to wrapping. In 1972, he erected a 400 by 100-metre “Valley Curtain” in Colorado and, four years later, a 38-kilometre “Running Fence” across California, both also made of nylon. In 1983, he surrounded three islands off Florida with 600 000 square metres of pink polypropylene. Three years ago, he simultaneously erected 1340 outsize blue umbrellas in Japan and 1760 yellow ones in California, all with a diameter of 8.7 metres.
His displays are invariably temporary, usually lasting no more than a few weeks. He always works in partnership with his wife, known as Jeanne-Claude, who was born the same day he was. She manages the finances. The couple refuse to accept any sponsorship, paying for every project themselves from the receipts of sketches, collages and scale models. They are something of an international artistic phenomenon.
The wrapping of the Reichstag is their most prestigious and high-profile project so far. They first conceived of it in 1972 but were rejected three times – in 1977, 1981 and 1987 – by the German and postwar Allied authorities that used to run Berlin. Not until a passionate 70-minute debate last February in the German parliament in Bonn, the Bundestag, was permission finally given, by 292 votes to 223.
The project will cost Christo and Jeanne-Claude up to $10 million. It is already employing about a hundred people and up to a thousand people will have been involved before it is finished. Weather permitting, the wrapping is scheduled to begin on 17 June and be completed about six days later. The building will remain wrapped for just two weeks, until 6 July, during which time between three and four million people are expected to visit Berlin to see it. Then, under the control of the British architect Norman Foster, the Reichstag will be virtually knocked down and rebuilt, ready for the Bundestag to move in towards the end of the decade.
The demands of Christo’s project have brought together an unusual array of technical experts. One company is responsible for weaving, cutting and sewing the fabric. Another is providing a silvery sheen by condensing 5 kilograms of aluminium vapour onto the polypropylene as a film just a few atoms thick. Most of the detailed design and implementation of the project, which must conform to the strict German building codes, is being co-ordinated by a German firm of engineers and architects experienced in lightweight structures, IPL from Radolfzell on Lake Constance.
Fluttering in the breeze
IPL was given Christo’s drawings and models, and told to make them work. The type of fabric had been decided, as had the stipulation that it had to amount to around twice the surface area of the Reichstag so that it would move in the wind. “The astonishing thing is that Christo’s drawings were as good as architects’ drawings,” recalls Hartmutt Ayrle, the project leader at IPL. “All we had to was to put in the engineering details.”
Ayrle’s team spent three months designing a three-dimensional computer model of the Reichstag, including every detail of its 16 statues, its 32 stone flower vases and its neoclassical facade. They estimated that the force of the wind on the fabric could be equivalent to a 3500-tonne weight. “We are building sails,” said Ayrle. “We want them to move in the wind but we do not want them to blow away.”
The fabric will be divided into 70 panels, each covering more than 1000 square metres and weighing about 800 kilograms. Christo prescribed the use of blue polypropylene rope 3.2 centimetres in diameter, and IPL decided that the rope could play a structural role, as well as an aesthetic one, by tying the fabric down. The plan is to use 8000 metres of rope secured through holes in the fabric to vertical rods of steel, each running from floor to ceiling and lying flat against the inside of 112 open windows. The rope will also be anchored at 200 points to the Reichstag’s roof beams and to hundreds of concrete blocks on the ground outside.
The carved stone figures on the roof will be protected by 48 specially designed steel cages, which will be assembled next to the Reichstag and installed by cranes from April onwards. The fabric will be hoisted onto the roof in large rolls, to be slowly unfurled down the building like a series of giant roller blinds. Around 150 people working in teams are expected to be required for the operation.
There will be no second chances if things go badly wrong, and IPL is doing all it can to minimise the risk of mistakes. It has defined a system of quality control that is much tougher than usually required for construction projects; for example, every company involved in the project has at least one extra person to monitor quality control.
The polypropylene fabric has had to undergo hundreds of tests over the past six months to ensure that it meets the requirements of the German building supervisory board, the government’s regulatory authority. The Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing in Berlin has examined the fabric’s strength, weathering ability, permeability and fire resistance. Adding a flame retardant to the polymer reduced the fabric’s flammability to well within the government’s requirements. But the tests showed that the additive increased the material’s sensitivity to sunlight. The fabric could lose 80 per cent of its strength after three weeks in the sun, so the time the polypropylene will spend in the open has been limited to 17 days. “We think it is going to be okay,” says Hartmut Schröder, the head of the institute’s textile laboratory.
Another fear was that a storm could send torrents of rainwater cascading off the work of art, endangering people on the streets and damaging surrounding roads and pathways. So the testing institute had to ensure that enough rainwater would seep through the fabric and not collect as potentially dangerous ponds high above the street. It also checked the fabric’s creep characteristics to ensure that the material would not stretch too much when it was draped over the building.
Whatever the artistic merits of the project, one group of local inhabitants is certain to be upset – the birds living on the Reichstag. As well hundreds of pigeons, there is a pair of nesting kestrels, which are protected under German conservation law. “The birds will have a problem,” says Ayrle, admitting that their routine will be disrupted for at least two weeks. “But the wrapping will be a minor annoyance compared with the disruption they can expect when the building is rebuilt.”
Art for recycling
Afterwards, Christo expects the materials to be recycled. The rope is a valuable material for which there will be buyers, particularly in the shipping industry. But finding a buyer for the fabric may be harder. Christo suggests that it could be used to make fertiliser bags, but environmental officials say the flame retardant could make it unsafe for use outdoors near water courses. “We are intending to recycle it for agricultural use,” insists a spokeswoman for Christo’s Berlin-based company, Verhüllter Reichstag (Wrapped Reichstag). “But we can’t say any more about it at the moment as we don’t know all the recycling possibilities.”
When asked why he is wrapping the Reichstag, Christo often ventures into the metaphysical. In January he was interviewed about the project and talked a great deal about the Reichstag’s fractured history. It always stood for democracy, he said, and demonstrated the encounters between East and West, and between the past and the future.
Ultimately he is wrapping the building just because he wants to. “With our money we can buy houses, we can buy Rolls-Royces, we can buy diamonds. We can do anything we like. It is our choice. We choose to build projects, not for capricious reasons but for aesthetic reasons,” he said. “My projects demonstrate absolute freedom. They exist without any rational reason, without any justification. They exist because artists like to have them, not some politicians, or some official gentlemen. And when my projects happen, when they are realised, they translate that freedom and they carry tremendous power.”
Inevitably Christo has his detractors. “This is a largely pointless exercise, a happening, an event, which really has nothing whatsoever to do with art,” says Brian Sewell, art critic of the London Evening Standard. Once you have wrapped one building, wrapping another is simply a “bore”, he says.
The attitude of the scientists involved in the project is rather different. “I personally regard it as a present for Germany, and for Berlin as the new capital and new seat of government,” says Schröder. “Perhaps when people look at the wrapped Reichstag they can experience the beginning of a new chapter in its history. With its unwrapping and renovation, they can look forward to Germany’s future with hope in their hearts.”