How Christo wrapped the Reichstag

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2020

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

The artist Christo died on May 31st 2020. Famous for wrapping landmarks in fabric and plastic, one of his most ambitious projects was the former German parliament building which sat on the border between East and West Berlin. It had been gutted by fire in 1933 and extensively damaged during the Second World War. In June 1995 Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude completed the monumental public art project which was seen by more than five million people and became a symbol for Berlin’s renewal after the collapse of communism and the reunification of Germany.

Christo spoke to Lucy Burns in 2019. This programme is a rebroadcast.

Picture: view of west and south facades of Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin 1971-1995 by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Photo by Wolfgang Volz, copyright Christo.

Transcript

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0:39.0	The artist Christo died on the 31st of May at his home in New York. He was famous for public artworks on a monumental
0:46.7	scale, wrapping landmarks in fabric and plastic for an audience of millions. I'm Lucy Burns and I spoke to Christo in June 2019
0:55.9	about maybe his most famous work. The time that he and his wife and creative partner Jean-Claude
1:01.6	wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin.
1:04.0	It's an eccentric dream but one that a husband and wife team have cherished for nearly a quarter of a century.
1:09.0	And this weekend the Bulgarian-born artist Christo and his wife Jean Clode began wrapping the German Parliament
1:15.6	building in silver fabric.
1:17.1	It is very difficult to explain if you don't see it.
1:20.1	No drawings, no sketch, no scale model can match the complexity of the project.
1:25.7	This is Christo.
1:27.0	He spoke to me from his studio in New York.
1:29.4	Every project I do, myself,
1:31.8	the links of something very personal. You know I was born in Bulgaria
1:36.6	in 1935 highly Sovietic communist country. As a young art student in the early
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