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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In Berlin, Foster houses legislators in a four-story-high fishbowl. People not only press in from the west portal, they can, if invited, access an entire mezzanine level and balcony. Reporters can observe interview targets from the press lobby that overlooks the deliberative chamber. (When the chamber is full, however, the view from the lobby is sacrificed to sound-absorbing blinds.)
Daylight filters in from every side through Wallot's massive portals and from overhead, reflected downward by the mirrored facets affixed to the exterior of the massive exhaust-air funnel. Even these reflections bring awareness of the presence of the people the Bundestag serves. Roof visitors' fragmented images are refracted into the chamber along with daylight.
Contrast this with the bunker mentality that has afflicted the design of prominent American government buildings. If the Reichstag design had to follow current American security standards, it would have been surrounded by a high wall. Wallot's broad window openings would have been shrunk to slits, and the transparency Foster has struggled so hard to achieve would have been torpedoed in the first client meeting. As it is, American officials not long ago asked the Berlin government to reroute streets around America's embassy site (only a few blocks away from the Reichstag) to create antiterrorist building setbacks. This would require sacrifice of parts of the city's historic Tiergarten, and was met with a storm of protest.
Of course American concern with security came from fatal experiences in Africa and the Middle East. Likewise, the Germans have hardly ignored security. Hefty bollards prevent auto approach. Visitors must pass through an airport-style X-ray inspection station. And, reportedly, visitors will not be allowed into the west portal and onto the roof when the Bundestag is sitting, although it was Foster's intention that they should be. The degree of public access, Foster says, "Is obviously tunable." Although plazas well-suited to the popular presentation of grievances have been built, their use by protesters may be strictly limited, all of which may undercut the transparent-government metaphor.
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