The Bundesrat: Portrait of a Building
[Images of the lobby]
On entering the lobby, the visitor’s gaze is drawn naturally first of all to the three domed vaults in the ceiling, through the zenith-like apertures in which daylight descends to suffuse the room. One can still see, within these vaults, besides their stucco ornamentation, also some fragments of the original ceiling paintings.
Nor will any visitor fail to be struck by the golden lances hanging suspended in the ceiling apertures. These are part of an installation entitled „Three Graces“ by the contemporary artist Rebecca Horn.
The lobby owes its atmosphere of warmth to the marble stucco in many colours which decorates its walls. It proved possible to preserve this wall cladding almost completely in its original form. Drawing here too on the historical original, the architects gave to the lobby a new floor of natural stone, into the middle of which there has been introduced a circular mirror – a further element of Rebecca Horn’s installation.
After the war, the seriously damaged lobby was not cleared of rubble and remained almost entirely unused. The improvised ceiling constructed at the beginning of the 1970’s split the room, halfway between its floor and its true ceiling, horizontally in two. The upper half became home to a refectory kitchen, a circumstance resulting in serious damage to the ceiling paintings in the area of the domes.
The general aesthetic principle governing the redesigning of the former Prussian Herrenhaus as seat for the Bundesrat was: “Sooner reinterpret existing features than reconstruct what no longer exists”. The results achieved by such a principle are particularly evident in the lobby - for example in its lighting design, which brings it about that this hall, once so sumptuously decorated, now reveals a different aspect, oriented toward the modern world.
Nor will any visitor fail to be struck by the golden lances hanging suspended in the ceiling apertures. These are part of an installation entitled „Three Graces“ by the contemporary artist Rebecca Horn.
The lobby owes its atmosphere of warmth to the marble stucco in many colours which decorates its walls. It proved possible to preserve this wall cladding almost completely in its original form. Drawing here too on the historical original, the architects gave to the lobby a new floor of natural stone, into the middle of which there has been introduced a circular mirror – a further element of Rebecca Horn’s installation.
After the war, the seriously damaged lobby was not cleared of rubble and remained almost entirely unused. The improvised ceiling constructed at the beginning of the 1970’s split the room, halfway between its floor and its true ceiling, horizontally in two. The upper half became home to a refectory kitchen, a circumstance resulting in serious damage to the ceiling paintings in the area of the domes.
The general aesthetic principle governing the redesigning of the former Prussian Herrenhaus as seat for the Bundesrat was: “Sooner reinterpret existing features than reconstruct what no longer exists”. The results achieved by such a principle are particularly evident in the lobby - for example in its lighting design, which brings it about that this hall, once so sumptuously decorated, now reveals a different aspect, oriented toward the modern world.