ABSTRACT
On September 21, 1949 the German Parliament moved into its newly renovated provisional home at the old Pedagogical Academy on the campus of Bonn University. In a scant nine months, the architect for the project, Hans Schwippert, had managed to fully renovate the old part of the building, and construct an addition to house the plenary chamber (Figure 5.1). Schwippert boldly declared his building the “first modern parliament building” explaining the transparency he used throughout the project as reflective of the goals of the new West German democracy.2 Seen in the light of Adenauer’s famous mantra, “No Experiments!” Hans Schwippert’s project for the first plenary chamber at Bonn Pedagogical Academy can be read as the attempt to realize an invisible, self-effacing building metaphorically tied to West Germany’s psyche in 1949. The Bundeshaus can also be read as an audacious experiment, as the first architectural attempt to assign meaning to the new regime-by constructing an analogy for democratic government as open, accessible, honest, fragile, egalitarian, and above all, transparent. Ultimately, the project is the first to demonstrate the mythological nature of transparent ideology for in spite of its use of material, spatial, and formal transparency the building is still very much physically present and perceptible while transparency in the political realm was limited at best. Transparency exists intermittently but is never whole or perfect.
