Die Vereinten Nationen in Bonn

The United Nations in Bonn
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suddenly found itself in the role of capital in 1949, the founding
fathers and mothers of the Federal Republic of Germany had to
improvise to accommodate the new parliamentary and governmental
institutions. The Parliamentary Council, which met in
Bonn from September 1948 until May 1949 to elaborate the Basic
Law, the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany,
gathered in the former Pedagogical Academy, built in 1933 in
the New Objectivity style. This building became the nucleus of
the new parliamentary district. Step by step, further wings and
annexes as well as a plenary hall for the German parliament, the
Bundestag, were added in the course of the following years. The
Altes Abgeordnetenhochhaus was built in 1953. Despite these
additions, however, the premises remained cramped. There was
a lack of office space for MPs and it soon became apparent that
more room was needed. An expert commission composed of
three prominent architects, Paul Baumgarten, Egon Eiermann
and Sep Ruf, was therefore established to determine how to
ameliorate the situation.
In 1966 the construction of a new building, designed by Egon
Eiermann, was begun. Eiermann is the author of other wellknown
post-war German architecture such as the new buildings
of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, the German
Embassy in Washington D.C., or the German Pavilion for the
1958 Brussels World Fair. The transparency, clear lines and sober
style of his buildings were intended to reflect the image of a
new, moderate and open country that the Federal Republic of
Germany sought to project. The Neues Abgeordnetenhochhaus
is no exception. However, it is not quite what Eiermann himself
had originally envisioned. His original idea had been to build a
lower, terraced complex. This, however, would have required
more land than the Federal Government was willing to make
available and so the only way out was up. The result was a 115
meter, 29-storey office tower that was soon colloquially referred
to as ‘Langer Eugen’ (‘Tall Eugen’), a tongue-in-cheek reference
to the President of the German Bundestag, Eugen Gerstenmaier,
who was one of the prime movers of the project – and a man of
rather modest height. Once inaugurated in 1969, the new building
offered numerous conference rooms for parliamentary committee
meetings and, for the first time ever, it afforded a separate
office – moderately sized at roughly 20 square meters – to every
member of the Bundestag. Following the departure of the German
Parliament to Berlin in 1999, and until 2003, it provided
office space for national and international educational institutions.