Eiffel Tower

9 Key excerpts on "Eiffel Tower"

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  Invention by Design

  How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing

  • Henry Petroski(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Eiffel is, of course, more commonly associated with the Paris tower that bears his name. Like the Crystal Palace, that tower had its origins in the planning for an interna-tional exhibition. The 1889 Exposition Universelle was to be held to commemorate the French Revolution, and a suitably distinctive monu-ment was sought for the occasion. Two engineers working in Eiffel’s firm, Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier, came up with the idea of a 300-meter (about 1000-foot) tall tower made of wrought iron. When they first showed their concept to Eiffel, he expressed little enthusiasm. How-ever, after Stephen Sauvestre, an architect with the firm, added some embellishments, Eiffel embraced the idea and eventually a patent on the structural design was secured (Fig. 10.4). Resisting wind forces was the main structural challenge in designing what came to be known as the Eiffel Tower, but some of the systems that were incorporated into it were also essential for its success. For example, it was clearly imperative that the tower be raised on a true vertical, which taxed the technology of the time. To ensure that things would not get out of alignment, a system of hydraulic jacks was incorporated into the four corner bases, so that corrections could be made as the tower rose. Com-pleting the tower structure would have been a feat in itself, but if people could not be efficiently transported to its top there would be no significant income to repay its cost. Thus, considerable effort went into designing the elaborate elevator system, which had to traverse not only the vertical central spire but also the inclined structural legs that gave the tower its stiffness in the wind.

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  Cultural Icons

  • Keyan G Tomaselli, David Scott, Keyan G Tomaselli, David Scott(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  My purpose in discussing the tower as a cultural icon is to recover the cultural, historical, and ideological context in which it came into being and then to trace the processes by which it attained its present meaning, and, in so doing, pick up threads of continuity between its original use and significance and our present conception of it. Visual and verbal works will be taken as documents reinforcing the meanings that have been imposed upon the tower over time. The primary issues are to determine at what point the original meanings lost their force, what physical circumstances imposed new meanings, and what media then codified these in the popular imagination. Thus, after having begun with my students’ twenty-first-century interpretation, I turn to the past to reinstate the Eiffel Tower in its original setting, moving from there to the twentieth century to explore its ensuing meanings in connection with historical and ideological factors. Finally, I shall analyze in what ways the current iconic significance of the tower relates to its past meanings.

  Before beginning, however, it is necessary to set forth the particularities of the tower as cultural icon. Unlike personalities like Madonna or Nelson Mandela, or a work of “high art” such as the Mona Lisa, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, or Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, the Eiffel Tower is a work of architecture, an engineering feat that was public and “popular” from the beginning, becoming a subject of high art only in the twentieth century. We are not dealing with the same kind of “popularization” or “degeneration” of an image in the public mind as with the aforementioned artworks. Moreover, because symbolic and nationalistic meanings were imposed upon it even before its completion, its iconic status has always been related to, as well as confused with, its function as a national symbol. Most importantly, the tower appeared at a decisive historical moment. Engendered by the emerging industrial society, its meanings were constructed by that society and its spin-offs: consumerism, public transport, mechanical reproduction, print culture. These combined in the creation of the tourist industry, with which, now as then, the tower is closely connected.

  Cultural Embeddedness: The Eiffel Tower in the Nineteenth-Century Architectural Context

  In his 1900 Conférence sur la tour de 300 mètres Gustave Eiffel (1996: 73–124) placed the tower as the culmination of a series of architectural ventures. The first project for a cast-iron tower attaining the symbolic height of 1,000 feet (304.80 m) was drawn up by the English engineer Richard Trevithick in 1833 to celebrate the vote on the third Reform Bill in 1832 (Lemoine 1989a: 79), an act that transformed the parliamentary system of representation in favor of the working classes. Though never undertaken, the project was resuscitated in 1874 by the American engineers Clarke and Reeves, who proposed to build a 1,000-foot iron tower to commemorate the American Revolution for the centennial celebration coinciding with the Universal Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. The tower would highlight the progress of science and art through the centuries (Lemoine 1989b: 21). Although praised in the pages of Scientific American

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  Fashioning the City

  Paris, Fashion and the Media

  • Agnès Rocamora(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  77 Thus Léon-Paul Fargue, in his 1939 text on the tower, notes that it ‘is the Parisian’s panache’, but also that ‘there is something of national union about it’, his writing taking the form of the tower and using the colors of the flag. 78 Similarly the magazine Tour Eiffel 1889–1989 , created for the centenary of the tower, states: Paris is known across the world as the city of the Eiffel Tower. [. . .] and why not another architectural or historical site? Because France’s warmth, magnificence, and creative tradition are incarnated in its prominent building: ‘The Eiffel Tower’. Work of art, vision of the future, and absolute symbol: A century after its creation the Eiffel Tower remains a question mark in the sky of the city of light and independence. [. . .] The whole world is at its feet. 79 Le Figaro praises the tower as one of ‘the 7 wonders of French Genius’, whilst Sulitzer notes that although one cannot dissociate the tower from its Paris location, it is also seen as ‘the most universal symbol of France’. 80 However, in spite of its frequent association with France as opposed simply to Paris, the tower nevertheless makes manifest the perceived superiority of the French capital over the nation it belongs to. Once again tension is expressed between the idea of Paris as part of France but also above and superior to it – in this case in the very materiality of the tower. Indeed, its height is a material feature that lends itself to the idea that Paris The Eiffel Tower in Fashion 167 is the high symbolic point of France, the place one aspires to. ‘Going up the Tower to contemplate Paris’, Barthes writes, is the equivalent of that first trip whereby le provincial ‘was going up’ to Paris to conquer it [. . .].

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  Greatness in Construction History

  Human Stories of Great People and Great Projects

  • Sherif Hashem(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Business Expert Press

    (Publisher)

  Figure 5.1 , born in Paris, France in 1889 AD. Born to bring joy to life, and symbolize values of love, elegance, and freedom. The story began in 1884 AD with the French government’s decision to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution, due in 1889 AD. In 1886 AD, Gustave Eiffel, the brilliant French contractor, won a national competition to design a monument to support the World’s Fair to be held in Paris in the same year of the centennial. The monument had to be as great as the French Revolution itself. Amidst opposition from haters and critiques, Gustave Eiffel and his brilliant team began the tower design and construction in early 1887 AD. When completed, the giant 324 m (1063 ft) high Eiffel Tower broke the world record becoming the tallest structure in the world, almost double the height of the Washington Monument. Greatness was felt in the air in the Camps de Mars Park where the tower was built, all over Paris, and indeed all over the world. The seductive ironwork tower standing on the verge of La Seine River in Paris has become a world’s “Symbol of Love,” and romance.

   

  What Makes This Project Great

  The Eiffel Tower marks a turning point in the history of building and architecture and represents a glorifying “output product” of the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, the following 10 points explain why the Eiffel Tower is great by any measure or standard:

  1. One of the most iconic man-made monuments in the world.

  2. The highest observation deck in Europe at 276 m (906 ft) high.

  3. The tallest tower in the world at the time it was built, 324 m (1,063 ft) high.

  4. Considered by some groups to be one of the top if not the Seven Wonders of the World.

  5. Pioneered-basing construction on structural analysis and design calculations.

  6. Sets perfect example for the application of the design–build method in the recent history.

  7. The world’s oldest known example for the application of the PPP and BOOT contracts.

  8. One of the world’s most visited touristic landmarks with ca 7 million visitors a year.

  9. Tower construction utilized ca 7,500 tons of ironwork and 2.5 million connection rivets.

  10. Completed in record design–build time of 26 months, that is 2 years, 2 months, and 5 days.

   

  Story Starring and Key Characters

  This story is starred by all project participants, in particular the great unknown laborers and their families; without their contribution, greatness would not have been achieved.

  Table 5.1 Story starring and key characters

  Gustave Eiffel [2 ]	Name	Gustave Eiffel
  Party	Compagnie des Établissements Eiffel
  Title	Managing Director
  Legacy	A French tycoon and Ironwork Constructor. A symbol of the Industrial Revolution. Best known for his iconic Eiffel Tower in Paris and fabricating the structure of the Statue of Liberty in New York.

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  Model Perspectives: Structure, Architecture and Culture

  • Mark R. Cruvellier, Bjorn N. Sandaker, Luben Dimcheff(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Tower’s second provision, as an object, is that, despite its technical singularity, it constitutes a familiar “little world”; from the ground level, a whole humble commerce accompanies its departure: vendors of postcards, souvenirs, knicknacks, balloons, toys, sunglasses, herald a commercial life which we rediscover thoroughly installed on the first platform. Now any commerce has a space-taming function; selling, buying, exchanging—it is by these simple gestures that men truly dominate the wildest sites, the most sacred constructions. The myth of the moneylenders driven out of the Temple is actually an ambiguous one, for such commerce testifies to a kind of affectionate familiarity with regard to a monument whose singularity no longer intimidates, and it is by a Christian sentiment (hence to a certain degree a special one) that the spiritual excludes the familiar; in Antiquity, a great religious festival as well as a theatrical representation, a veritable sacred ceremony, in no way prevented the revelation of the most everyday gestures, such as eating or drinking: all pleasures proceeded simultaneously, not by some heedless permissiveness but because the ceremonial was never savage and certainly offered no contradiction to the quotidian. The Tower is not a sacred monument, and no taboo can forbid a commonplace life to develop there, but there can be no question, nonetheless, of a trivial phenomenon here; the installation of a restaurant on the Tower, for instance (food being the object of the most symbolic of trades), is a phenomenon corresponding to a whole meaning of leisure; man always seems disposed—if no constraints appear to stand in his way—to seek out a kind of counterpoint in his pleasures: this is what is called comfort. The Eiffel Tower is a comfortable object, and moreover, it is in this that it is an object either very old (analogous, for instance, to the ancient Circus) or very modern (analogous to certain American institutions such as the drive-in movie, in which one can simultaneously enjoy the film, the car, the food, and the freshness of the night air). Further, by affording its visitor a whole polyphony of pleasures, from technological wonder to haute cuisine, including the panorama, the Tower ultimately reunites with the essential function of all major human sites: autarchy; the Tower can live on itself: one can dream there, eat there, observe there, understand there, marvel there, shop there; as on an ocean liner (another mythic object that sets children dreaming), one can feel oneself cut off from the world and yet the owner of a world.

  Photo: Emi Yasuda

  Agrandissement des écoles primaires n° 5 et 6. Construction d’un Jardin. Ensembles et détails de la charpente en fer. 1902 (By permission of the Municipal Archive of Elsene)

  The debate that Roland Barthes lays bare in the preceding essay between those who saw the Eiffel Tower as the embodiment of a new age of technological and societal development versus those who were horrified by its exposed structural skeleton in the midst of aesthetically “dignified” Paris, is echoed here at the much more intimate scale of Belgian model schools. Built in communities nationwide over a forty-year period that straddled 1900, the schools each incorporated, for progressive health reasons, a central covered courtyard — thus requiring a long-span structural system, something the truss is exceptionally well-suited for. This group of schools thereby created the equivalent of a controlled experiment on the development of truss forms at that time between the highly efficient, “industrial”, still-today-renowned Polonceau truss and the much less rational, “artistic”, now-somewhat-obscure Ardant truss. Belgian society sometimes demonstrated a certain ambivalence between these two forms, and variations of both types were sometimes drawn up and carefully detailed as alternates for a single project (left; for the school in helles, adjacent to Brussels). In a rather ironical denouement to this particular story, the authors clearly demonstrate that advances in methods of structural analysis led away from the more contemporary, rational truss form; it is left for the reader to draw potential parallels between this and the structural forms that today’s digital technologies have enabled.

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  Elevator Systems of the Eiffel Tower, 1889

  • Robert M. Vogel(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  Second to the interest shown in the tower’s structural aspects was the interest in its mechanical organs. Of these, the most exceptional were the three separate elevator systems by which the upper levels were made accessible to the Exposition visitors. The design of these systems involved problems far greater than had been encountered in previous elevator work anywhere in the world. The basis of these difficulties was the amplification of the two conditions that were the normal determinants in elevator design—passenger capacity and height of rise. In addition, there was the problem, totally new, of fitting elevator shafts to the curvature of the Tower’s legs. The study of the various solutions to these problems presents a concise view of the capabilities of the elevator art just prior to the beginning of the most recent phase of its development, marked by the entry of electricity into the field.

  The great confidence of the Tower’s builder in his own engineering ability can be fully appreciated, however, only when notice is taken of one exceptional way in which the project differed from works of earlier periods as well as from contemporary ones. In almost every case, these other works had evolved, in a natural and progressive way, from a fundamental concept firmly based upon precedent. This was true of such notable structures of the time as the Brooklyn Bridge and, to a lesser extent, the Forth Bridge. For the design of his tower, there was virtually no experience in structural history from which Eiffel could draw other than a series of high piers that his own firm had designed earlier for railway bridges. It was these designs that led Eiffel to consider the practicality of iron structures of extreme height.

      Larger Image

  Figure 1.—The Eiffel Tower at the time of the Universal Exposition of 1889 at Paris. (From La Nature

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  Eiffel

  • David I Harvie(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  3 As Eiffel had done with his early drawing of the Garabit Viaduct, Koechlin compiled a scale reference composed of sketches of Notre Dame, the Statue of Liberty, the Arc de Triomphe and three versions of the Vendôme columns all piled on top of each other. He showed the draft plan to Eiffel, who expressed no interest in it but gave permission for the two to study it further. Sauvestre became involved, drawing up a large-scale refined architectural drawing showing highly spraddled (therefore efficiently wind-resisting) lattice-work legs and including an arch between the base and the first-level platform, on which was sited a 45,192sq.ft glass-panelled gallery. It showed a 9,685sq.ft gallery on the second level, and a 2,690sq.ft glass dome and exterior balcony at the top; the drawing was later reproduced in a brochure published by the Eiffel Company. The detailed design work was not confined to the niceties of ‘how it looked’, but implied consideration of the mathematics of weight, gravity and wind forces acting on the individual components. The four great legs are not spread and curved principally for aesthetic reasons, but because Eiffel and Koechlin allowed their computation of the stresses acting against the smallest individual iron part to define the design.

  These considerations infuriated the traditionalists, who were outraged that the absolute role of aesthetics was here subservient to what they regarded as the wholly mechanical and commercially driven. They were unwilling to recognise that only new materials, and therefore new methods, could construct something so high; they became obsessed with what for them was an ‘industrial’ enterprise devoid of ‘art’ as its central purpose. Lockroy and his fellow administrators did, however, see the uniqueness of such a project as a massive iron tower. Not only that, but they invested it with attributes that seem very much of our own time; the tower would be democratic in style – the product of new cooperation between public and private resources, and the product also of new materials and methods. The key words were to be symbolic: inventiveness, wealth-creating, motivational; the engineering was being perceived to be social as much as mechanical.

  Sauvestre’s drawing was shown to Frédéric Bartholdi, and Antonin Proust insisted that it ought to be exhibited at an exhibition of decorative arts, which led inevitably to the start of a long period of public discussion and controversy. Having been asked to discuss the drawing with Sauvestre, Eiffel resiled from his earlier indifference; there could be no question of anyone other than Gustave Eiffel himself undertaking such a project, particularly not one emanating from his own employees. But he realised that he would have to recognise the work of the other three, which he did by buying the exclusive patent rights from his three colleagues on 12 December 1884.4

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  The Rough Guide to Paris

  • (Author)
  • 0(Publication Date)
  • Rough Guides

    (Publisher)

  Outraged critics protested against this “grimy factory chimney”. “Is Paris”, they asked, “going to be associated with the grotesque, mercantile imaginings of a constructor of machines?” Eiffel believed it was a piece of perfectly utilitarian architecture. “The basic lines of a structure must correspond precisely to its specified use,” he said. “To a certain extent the tower was formed by the wind itself.” Curiously, this most celebrated of landmarks was only saved from demolition by the sudden need for “wireless telegraphy” aerials in the first decade of the twentieth 150 THE Eiffel Tower QUARTER THE Eiffel Tower AND AROUND 10 century, and nowadays the original crown is masked by an efflorescence of antennae. The tower’s colour scheme has changed too: the early coats of deep red then canary-yellow paint have been covered with a sober, dusty brown since the late 1960s. The only structural maintenance it has ever needed was carried out in the 1980s, when one thousand tonnes of metal were removed to make the tower ten percent lighter, and the frame was readjusted to remove a slight warp. In 2017, it was announced that the tower’s system of temporary railings and checkpoints – raised in the wave of increased citywide security following the terrorist attacks two years earlier – was to be replaced by a bulletproof glass wall around the base of the structure with bag checks for anyone wanting to get into the area below the tower and then again for those waiting to access the north pilier and ascend to the top. Champ de Mars Stretching back from the Eiffel Tower, the Champ de Mars has been an open field ever since it was used as a mustering ground for royal troops – hence the name “Martial Field”. After 1789 it became the venue for the great revolutionary fairs, including Robespierre’s vast “Fête of the Supreme Being” in 1794, while the Second Empire turned it into a giant industrial exhibition area, which explains the location of the Eiffel Tower.

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  The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film

  • Ian Aitken(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  E

  DOI: 10.4324/9780203148068-6

  Eiffel Tower, The

  (France, Clair, 1928)

  René Clair’s short film La Tour (The Eiffel Tower), with a running time of fifteen minutes, is a paean to the French icon of modernity—the Eiffel Tower. The film is constructed as a cinematic postcard using rhythmical montage and editing as its poetic means of expression. Similar to the ‘city symphonies’, many of which were being made at the same time, Clair’s film straddles the margins between documentary and experimental film in its treatment of subject matter. Traveling up and down the monument, Clair’s camera emphasizes the ‘iron lass’ itself and the materials used to create it: the iron girders, the elevators, the cages. Clair constructs his film with sequences of varying lengths and speed, which make up a visual poem. As a hybrid genre it represents, as do many of Clair’s short films, an attempt at ‘pure cinema’, a film that is totally free of narrative restraints, and whose subject is realized completely through the creative use of the film medium.

  The Eiffel Tower was made after René Clair had completed Une Chapeau de paille d’Italie/The Italian Straw Hat in 1927. Clair had used the French landmark as an important setting in his film, Paris qui dort (1924), and felt that he had not used it enough because of the requirements of the scenario. The director wanted to make a film (‘une documentaire lyrique’) expressing his adoration of the Eiffel Tower. He discussed the idea with his production company, Albatros-Kamenka, which in turn provided him with a camera and film for the project. The short film was shot on location at the Eiffel Tower during the spring of 1928, and editing was completed in the autumn of that year.

  The Eiffel Tower begins with a postcard-like image of the tower standing against a cloud-filled sky. This pictorial stasis is soon broken by a rapid montage of images of portions of the tower. Clair then returns to the opening shot and fades out. The director then uses a series of short sequences, interconnected by dissolves, showing the history of the construction of the monument. Beginning with a portrait of Gustave Eiffel and architectural blueprints, the sequence progresses through the birth of the tower. The final shot of this sequence shows the completed tower with a title card that reads ‘1889’. Clair then uses a slow tilt all the way up the tower that fades to black. The camera then enters the structure and begins an upward ascent to the various observation decks. Clair’s camera movements progress upward from shot to shot, either by tilting the camera or with ‘crane shots’ taken from the tower elevator. At each level Clair pauses the camera to inspect the surroundings before progressing to another upward tilt to the next platform. When Clair’s camera reaches the top, it briefly looks down to observe a man below looking down on the crowd below him. The camera then begins to descend much more quickly until it reaches ground level. Clair then returns to a close shot of the top of the tower. The end of the film returns to its opening postcard-like image of the Eiffel Tower amid a cloud-filled skyline.

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