With His Sleek Ecological Design, Lord Norman Foster Imbues the Reichstag with Germany's New Self Image
Architectural Record, July 1999
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Ironically, Foster's competition-winning design had no dome. His first scheme envisioned a vast translucent canopy stretching over and well beyond the existing Reichstag. Jurors in the first competition gave first prizes to Foster, the Dutch architect Pi de Bruijn and Santiago Calatrava, (whose scheme did have a dome). With a much reduced program (many functions going into the adjacent government strip, the design of which had been awarded contemporaneously to Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank), Foster won a second round, still with no dome. After Foster got the job, conservative political and architectural factions argued for restoration of Wallot's dome, which Foster calls, "an empty, vacuous historic statement." He threatened to resign if a recreated dome was forced on him. But he came to accept the need for some kind of external expressive element because "the internal transformation became so far reaching." After considering many variations, he found a way to undermine the rhetorical aspect of a traditional dome by making it the symbol of publicly accessible government and the focus of an ambitious ecological-design scheme.
Indeed, the entire Reichstag project is a demonstration of sustainable-design innovation. The heating and cooling plant is powered by oil derived from renewable date palm, rape, or sunflower seeds. Excess heat can be stored in a natural aquifer 1,000 feet below the surface or used to operate an absorption-cooling plant. The thickness of the original stone walls adds useful thermal mass, and the old window openings have been filled with new insulated, thermally broken windows that can be opened manually or by the building's energy-management system to vent excess heat. There is a separate, fixed outer glazed layer on these windows with a gap around the edges for ventilation. It acts primarily as a thermal buffer, but where needed, the glass light is strengthened to resist bullets and other projectiles.
Foster's office claims such strategies turn the building into a producer rather than a consumer of energy. (Excess energy can be routed to adjacent structures.) The building also reduce emitted carbon dioxide to just 440 tons annually, compared to 7,000 tons (energy enough to heat the homes of 5,000 people) emitted by the building prior to its renovation.
The Bundestag willingly collaborated with Foster's office in the provision of these costly technologies. As Foster's office put it, the ecological regime is "one of the Reichstag's most intrinsic expressions of optimism."
Another guiding metaphor at the Reichstag is architectural transparency as an expression of political accessibility. Indeed, this has been the reigning metaphor in post-Fascist West Germany, most eloquently rendered in the glass-walled pavilion architect Behnisch & Partners erected for the West German Bundestag on the banks of the Rhine. Completed only in 1992, its history as the country's chief deliberative chamber has already ended.
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