GAD Editorial · Published ·
Few commissions carry the weight of the Reichstag. The 1894 parliament building in Berlin had been burned, bombed, and divided by a wall; when Germany reunified, the Bundestag needed a home that acknowledged the past without being imprisoned by it. Norman Foster's answer, completed in 1999, was to put a glass dome where the old one had been destroyed — and to make transparency the building's entire argument.
The dome is about 40 metres across and 23.5 metres high, a lattice of steel and glass that visitors ascend via a spiralling ramp. At its centre, a mirrored cone reflects daylight down into the debating chamber below, so the public literally looks down on its parliament — and the parliament works under the public's gaze. The symbolism is not subtle, but reunified Berlin was not a moment for subtlety.
The Bundestag held its first session in the rebuilt Reichstag on 19 April 1999. Foster kept the scars where they mattered — Soviet graffiti from 1945 is preserved on the walls — while the new work is all lightness and openness. It remains the clearest built statement of an idea that defined the 1990s: that democracy, to be believed, has to be seen.
The dome also works as pure experience. The ramp coils upward between the mirrored cone and the glass skin, so the climb is a slow panorama of Berlin — the Tiergarten, the Brandenburg Gate, the city's east-west seams still faintly visible. At the top, the open oculus lets the weather in; rain and snow fall through the centre of the parliament's roof. It is a long way from the building's 1894 origins and its twentieth-century wounds, and that distance is the point. Foster's reconstruction doesn't erase history — the preserved traces of 1945 remain on the walls below — it puts a new idea above it: that a parliament can be a place citizens ascend, look out from, and feel ownership of.
Key facts
- Completed: 1999 (reconstruction; Bundestag first session 19 April 1999)
- Location: Berlin, Germany
- Architect: Foster + Partners (Norman Foster)
- Construction: glass-and-steel dome, approx. 40 m diameter and 23.5 m high, with a mirrored cone reflecting daylight into the chamber