With Jeanne-Claude, Christo realized some of the most celebrated public installations of the past half-century, often using ordinary materials to defamiliarize treasures of human ingenuity in order to renew their meaning within the landscape. Among the structures wrapped by the couple were islands in Biscayne Bay in Miami, the Reichstag in Berlin, and of course, the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris. While the wrapping was the most visible aspect of their practice, the act itself exposed the invisible, tangled bureaucracies and ambitions behind the creation of vast monuments-and the real-world consequences of those efforts.
In September 1985, Christo and Jeanne-Claude created a temporary public art project in Paris by wrapping the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in the city with gold-colored fabric.