© 1995 Christo & Prestel Verlag

Interview with Christo

Interviewer: Masahiko Yanagi

Page 8 of 12

With friendly permission by Prestel Verlag

Collage 1992
Foto: Wolfgang Volz
Collection Jeanne-Claude Christo, New York

Yanagi:

Had you known about the Reichstag before you started this project?

I knew a little bit about the Reichstag because of the Bulgarian, Dimitroff, who became the first president of Bulgaria after the second war. But I was not really familiar with the building itself until I started to work on the project.

Yanagi:

In what season do you want to wrap the Reichstag?

When we do a project, not only the Reichstag project, we try to do it during the most pleasant period of the year. It would be very sad and confusing if we were to do the wrapping during the cold, windy and miserable winter. The ideal is to have it in good weather, starting from the late spring to early fall. For the moment, we have had a talk with the mayor of Berlin, Mr. Eberhard Diepgen and we hope the date is going to be sometime in late June or early July 1988. The summer in Berlin is very active. Berlin is like an island, and the Berliners cannot go to the countryside because the city is surrounded by East Germany. Most of the Berliners use the parks and the open public spaces during the summer. Ideally, to do it when the Berliners are outdoors would also involve the East Berliners who can also see the building. Also for technical reasons, since much of the work will be fabricated outside, and the roof of the building will become our working platform we need to have good weather.

How long will the Reichstag be wrapped?

Like the The Pont Neuf Wrapped, the Running Fence, and the Surrounded Islands, we would like to have it for two weeks.

Do you think that if you keep it wrapped for a longer time more people can experience it?

My creative process ends when the work is completed. Probably, it can stay longer, but it is too expensive. I cannot be involved with the housekeeping of the project for more than two weeks. It could easily stay a month or two, but it becomes extremely expensive for us and we can plan our projects and our costs up to a point, after that it is pointless.

Collection (two parts) 1992
Foto: Wolfgang Volz
Private collection, Berlin

Yanagi:

When the building is wrapped, what is going to happen inside?

We don't want to stop the use of the building. The West German government will be involved with the wrapping of the building, and probably won't use the building for anything except the current exhibition and the restaurant.

I believe the wrapping of this large building will be an enormous undertaking. How much are you usually involved with the technical design of the actual wrapping?

Very much. In some way, all the time, because nobody knows how to wrap a building, even I don't know. Curiously enough, with the Reichstag project we have advanced very far in the technical procedure because in 1984/85 there was a chance that we could do the Reichstag project before the Pont Neuf project. Our American engineers went often to Berlin. We spent many days there doing technical studies. I have made several scale models, including an engineering scale model. Then there was another confusing political failure. However, much of the general idea of how it is to be wrapped is already quite clear. When we do an urban project, we need to create a working area. In this case it could have been on the side of the building, but not the east facade because it would require putting cranes in the Soviet territory, which is impossible. For the east facade, we will be obliged to work from the roof which is why we have decided to do all the work from the top. Because the roof is a fragile area with glass and asphalt we need to build a second roof on top of the roof of the Reichstag almost like a scaffolding covered with wood. The fabric will be hoisted to the roof, folded in protective cocoons and we will have our cranes and workers up there. That is the rationale of why we decided to have the fabric on the top of the building and by the simple gravity of the fabric, follow the material down with less interference from the public traffic around the building.

We will use a number of methods which worked well with the Pont Neuf project; we will install cables under the fabric and also at the bottom. This was not sure in 1984/85 when the engineer designed that system since we had not yet tested it in the Pont Neuf project, but with the wrapping of the bridge in Paris we saw that the cable system supporting the fabric from underneath was clever and ingenious in that it was not more expensive, but was quite fast and easy to install, very light and also appropriate to secure my ropes. With the Pont Neuf street lights we had to cage them at the top under the fabric; those lamps were relatively small, but with the Reichstag we will need to build enormous cages for all these huge sculpted stone soldiers and urns to protect them. Formally I would like to transform the shape of the building which is extremely broken visually, and I would like the building to have a more general and simplifed shape. All that will take some time to prepare. That will be done in a factory in advance, and then brought to the Reichstag.

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© 1995 Christo & Prestel Verlag