The Story of Bonn’s Empty Government Buildings
When a national capital moves to another city
In early November 2025, I traveled to Bonn (Germany) to attend the Urban Metabolism and the Archeology of Cities in Eurasia conference.
The conference was attended by about thirty researchers. It was an eye-opener.
As an engineer, I focus on the present and the future. I know next to nothing about archeology. I was excited to learn about cities of the past, and I learned tons.
Water and waste management in medieval cities was much more developed than I had ever imagined. Many houses in cities had private wells. Local populations mastered gravity. Cesspits were dug and cleaned.
This conference made me want to travel to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and Mongolia. And it made me want to attend more archeology conferences.
The conference chair, Jan Bemmann, invited me because of my work on urban metabolism and infrastructure.
He invited three people with outside expertise to infuse new ideas into conventional archeology.
His strategy worked. It was one of my favorite conferences. I plan to continue working with some of the people I met.
Beyond the conference, I had another agenda. Something had been nagging me about Bonn since I received the invitation.
After World War II, Bonn became the capital of West Germany. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was only a matter of time before the government relocated to Berlin.
On my way to Bonn, I kept thinking about what had happened to all the former government buildings. They must have been bustling with activity during the fifty years Bonn hosted the parliament (from 1949 to 1999). The streets must have been filled with spies. All that activity quieted down overnight.
The picture below shows the Deutscher Bundestag (the old parliament building in Bonn). The building is surprisingly unassuming.1 I faced it every day while eating breakfast at my hotel.
Moving a capital to a different city inevitably means empty government buildings. Parliament buildings, government offices, ministries… that’s a lot of infrastructure.
What do you do with these government buildings when a national capital moves to another city?
Do you lock the buildings and leave? Do you turn them into a museum or apartments (see my previous post)? Do you bulldoze them? That’s not an easy question to answer. The options are limitless.
In particular, I had heard about Langer Eugen (Tall Eugene),2 the 29-story skyscraper shown below. It’s the building where most members of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat had offices.
I wanted to know what had happened to it. Was it falling apart?
I am pleased to report that the strategy adopted was not only smart, but brilliant! The Germans are practical people.
Maybe you could already tell by looking at the emblem at the top of Langer Eugen. The complex was turned into a United Nations (UN) campus.
The upgrade started in 2003 and was completed in 2006. The complex is owned by the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety but used rent-free by the UN.
The Bonn UN campus hosts nearly 1,000 staff members working in over twenty UN organizations.
Bonn is home to the headquarters for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The UNFCCC has been at the forefront of pushing for international agreements to combat climate change, including the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.
With all these activities, the campus became too small. A 17-story tower was added in 2022. It is the Climate Tower (smaller tower on the left-hand side below). It hosts 330 staff members from the UNFCCC.
For someone who’s devoting his professional life to making the world more sustainable, I was excited to see the UNFCCC headquarters.
I arrived in Bonn in the early evening. After checking into my hotel, I walked around the neighborhood. Besides the UN Campus, a few government buildings remain, along with institutes, museums, businesses (including the DHL headquarters), and university buildings (including the one where the conference was held).
The streets were clean and empty. Most buildings are four-to five-story high. Stereotypical of German architecture, they’re all geometric and impeccable. I did not see a single curve.3
The autumn leaves rustled on the ground. The clunk-clunk of passing U-Bahn trains could be heard in the distance, along with the humming of a few cars. I felt bored and safe.
Everything around exhumed German efficiency. Everything felt a little cold. The twenty-year-old in me wanted liveliness, but the forty-year-old in me was happy.
In the morning, on my way to the conference, I saw UN workers buying coffee and sandwiches from small vendors in front of the complex before queuing up for security checks at the main gate.
This trip also enabled me to visit the city of Bonn. As an urban engineer, I enjoy seeing how cultural venues intertwine with infrastructure.
As I wandered around the city, district heating pipelines were getting installed next to the tall Münster Catholic Church, built in the thirteenth century.
Trams were transporting people to the new Stadthaus (City Hall), featuring modern architecture.
The statue of Beethoven on Münsterplatz was overlooking the logistics of installing this year’s Christmas market.
For centuries, infrastructure on Vivatsgasse sat quietly, ready to welcome fall showers and prevent urban flooding, mastering the forces of gravity.
Bonn is a great city. I hope to return at some point, maybe for UN business this time.
Overall, my experience in the former West German capital was unusual. When I walk around Washington, DC, Paris, or Berlin, I am in awe of the government buildings. They show their historical importance. They call for respect and order.
In Bonn, I was not awed when I walked around the former West German government district. Instead, something more powerful happened. I was inspired. I was inspired to stop reminiscing about my worries and miseries. I was inspired to focus on what matters. I was inspired to work and get things done.
With the looming beacon of the UN emblem at the top of Langer Eugen, I was inspired to write this story and to keep working hard toward making cities more livable, sustainable, and resilient.
Sometimes, we all need a Bonn in our lives. I know it was just what I needed, and I will cherish this experience. Thank you, Bonn.
And thank you, the reader, for taking the time to read this story.
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The Reichstag building in Berlin is imposing with a neoclassical style, upgraded in the 1990s.
The building was ironically nicknamed after Eugen Gerstenmaier, the President of the Bundestag at the time and an advocate of the building, because he was short.
The one exception is the DHL headquarters. It’s the large tower that overlooks Langer Eugen (to the right in the picture above). Industries are never too far from governments, often in nicer buildings. What does that tell you?