Christo, artist

It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen: 100 rock climbers abseiling down the facade of the Reichstag, slowly unfurling this huge silvery curtain. There were no cranes or machinery, just people descending in a kind of aerial ballet. It was 1995 and huge crowds came to watch. Then, when it was finished, they came up to stroke the fabric.

Five million people came to see it in two weeks but, for a long time, we never thought the project would happen. My wife, Jeanne-Claude, and I first proposed the idea of wrapping a public building way back in 1961, during a show in Cologne. We made a collage with some text, saying that either a prison or a parliament should be wrapped, since those are the only truly public buildings. It’s much easier to wrap an art gallery, though, so we started with the Kunsthalle in Bern in 1968.

Eight years later, I went to Berlin for the very first time. I was so scared. The city was still divided and there were spies everywhere. I thought they would arrest me. The historian Michael Cullen introduced me to the Reichstag, and it seemed like the perfect subject: unused since the fire of 1933, it was the only building straddling both sides of the city. To me, as a Bulgarian refugee who fled communism, east-west relations are very important.

‘There were spies everywhere’ … Christo with a drawing of Wrapped Reichstag. Photograph: Lutz Schmidt/Reuters

Of course there were complications. The building is so symbolic, we faced a lot of opposition. In the course of 24 years, we worked with six different presidents of the Bundestag and were refused three times. I was so depressed, I was ready to give up. Then finally, in 1994, it went to a vote and we won.

The main argument in our favour was the fact that we would fund the project ourselves, by selling our models and drawings, which is how we now pay for all our work. With all the engineers and consultants, they aren’t cheap. The Reichstag cost $15.3m and that was 1995 money.

Everything we do is copyrighted and trademarked, and we always rent at least 1km around the site, so no one can use our work as a backdrop for commercial purposes. It has to stay pure. The Three Tenors wanted to sing in front of the Wrapped Reichstag, but of course we said no.

The city wanted to keep it up for longer, but we never let a work exist for more than two weeks. If you don’t see it, you don’t see it. We will never make another floating pier, never place another curtain across a canyon – and we will never wrap another parliament.



Wolfgang Volz, project manager

We were so naive. We thought we could do this project while Berlin was still divided, but it was impossible. However, when the wall fell in 1989, everything changed. I’d been photographing the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude [who died in 2009] since we met in 1971, but with the Reichstag project I became their local interpreter, political adviser and, ultimately, project manager.

Christo’s crew abseiling down the Reichstag in 1995. Photograph: Sylvia Volz

It was such a politically charged project. The Reichstag had always embodied tradition and nationalism. The Nazis held propaganda exhibitions there and most likely started the fire that had left it vacant. It was made clear to everyone that the Reichstag was simply not to be touched. Our proposal was blocked by every senior politician.

So we had to become politicians ourselves and learn parliamentarian life. We spoke personally with all 350 deputies. Helmut Kohl, then chancellor, didn’t count on us having that amount of endurance. But we managed to convince them with our three-point argument: it was simply an art project with no hidden message; it would be paid for privately; and all materials would be recycled.

Next we had to apply for a building permit, producing a 700-page document with all the rigour demanded for a permanent building, as if you were proposing an airport. We had to deal with all the different regulatory departments – police, fire, building control – in the two different sectors of the city, one until recently communist.

Thankfully, we’d had plenty of time to prepare. We made full-scale mock-ups, draping fabric over a castle tower near Hannover, and we had rented a former Soviet airbase to build our own segment of the Reichstag. After lots of tests, Christo and Jeanne-Claude chose a kind of aluminium fabric that’s usually used in water filters. The power of the final result made Christo the most famous artist in Germany – which he still is today.

