The Bulgarian-born artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and his Moroccan-born wife Jeanne-Claude began developing the idea of wrapping the Reichstag building in Berlin in 1971. For 24 years they lobbied the Bundestag for permission; debates ran on design, engineering, insurance, and the artists' insistence on financing the work themselves. Helmut Kohl personally opposed the project. In a Bundestag vote on 25 February 1994, the project was finally approved 292 to 223.

On 17 June 1995 a team of 90 climbers and 120 installation specialists began draping the fabric over the building. 100,000 m² of silver aluminium-coated polypropylene and 15.6 km of blue polypropylene rope — the cloth settled onto the building's contours yet at the same time turned 'all the surfaces into one object'. The building was visible, but its openings, columns, and windows could not be made out for fourteen days.

The installation was open from 24 June to 7 July; some five million visitors sat on the surrounding lawn. Christo and Jeanne-Claude financed every project themselves — through sales of sketches, books, and prints — and refused to allow the work to be sold: 'the only value we have to produce is aesthetic', they said. After 14 days the Reichstag was unwrapped; the fabric was recycled.

The project's political resonance was high. The Reichstag burned in 1933, was taken by Soviet troops in 1945, and stood two steps from the East-West border throughout the Cold War. In 1995 it was being renovated as the parliament of the newly reunified Germany; the wrapping carried the sense of 'erasing before seeing' — when the building reopened it would do so as something else entirely, crowned by Norman Foster's glass dome.