Original Dome
The original Reichstag building was proposed due to a need for a larger parliamentary building. Construction did not immediately begin due to debates between Otto von Bismarck and Reichstag members. In 1894, after an architectural contest, the winner, Frankfurt architect Paul Wallot, was chosen to design the building, which featured a very large dome.
On February 27, 1933, the dome was destroyed along with the rest of the building in the Reichstag fire, an act blamed on the Communists, despite there being little evidence to determine who actually started the fire. The remains of the building and the dome were further demolished with the bombings of Berlin through World War II and the eventual fall of Berlin to the Soviets in 1945. While the Reichstag building was partially reconstructed in the 1960s as a conference center, the dome was not. Much of the dome and the ornaments that decorated it had been removed by that time.
Read more about this topic: Reichstag Dome
Famous quotes containing the words original and/or dome:
“Elsa Bannister: The Chinese say “It is difficult for love to last long; therefore one who loves passionately is cured of love, in the end.”
Michael O’Hara: That’s a hard way of thinking.
Elsa: There’s more to the proverb: “Human nature is eternal; therefore one who follows his nature keeps his original nature, in the end.””
—Orson Welles (1915–1985)
“A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)