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1999 saw the opening of the Sir Norman Foster-designed renovation of the Reichstag, the original seat of German Parliament that had been completed just over one-hundred years prior. In the span of that century, Berlin saw some of the most dramatic shifts of power ever witnessed by any modern capital--from constitutional monarchy, communism, Hitler's Third Reich, the post-war division of the East and West and, finally, the fall of the Berlin Wall and a return to representative democracy. The new Reichstag was, in many ways, meant to signal what architectural historian Deborah Ascher Barnstone calls the "German transparency ideology and its near mythical association with democracy." Through the heavy use of glass and the introduction of a public element, Foster sought to put a much more accessable face on a building that had played such an important role as the face of a state long marred by totalitarian and undemoratic rule.

 

 

 
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