Norman Foster, the British architect behind the Gherkin and London’s City Hall, designed the German parliament building in 1999 as part of renovations to the Reichstag. Like most other European countries, Germany’s assembly hall follows the semicircle plan.
The fan-shaped layout is neoclassical in origin; Ancient Greek and Roman theaters were the first to use amphitheater seating to give audience members better views and acoustics. “The reference to antiquity was to give the new state’s assemblies an aura of gravitas and ancient anchoring,” van der Vegt and Cohen de Lara write in the introduction to Parliament. The seating also places parliament members beside each other, eliminating visual signs of power. “Unlike the opposing benches, the semicircle fuses the members of parliament into a single entity.”
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- [in-enaction] The Design of Parliaments Has a Funkadelic Impact on Politics | WIRED, Saturday, September 17, 2016 - 05:24