I've seen these pictures before, usually in some dorm room poster format, but I ran across them a few days ago and it got me thinking about how iconic the Eiffel Tower has become, and thus how strange it looks unfinished. It's also funny it is that the Eiffel Tower is never challenged these days. There aren't many people walking around say, "Gah, that Eiffel Tower really gets me down."
In fact, it's become a strange symbol for girlishness and romance, usually set against a pale pink background (at least in the states). It's a common Prom theme. This is strange.
Eiffel, an engineer, saw the work as an exercise in a new material--iron--and an example of well-executed craftsmanship.
Roland Barthes, a philosopher and all around badass, mocked the tower as a failure in his "The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies." He comments,
"Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.”
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| Construction photos by Théophile Féau from 1887-1889 |
Ah, Barthes. Eiffel made a building without walls. It can't count as architecture--it certainly wouldn't pass a building code. And yet, it became the tallest building in the world. It can't be sculpture--too huge, too different from the marble sculpture that still dominated the sculptural scene. It's not a monument, like the Statue of Liberty created a few years earlier--what does it symbolize? What is it then? It's useless.
That's one definition of art: useless.
It seems that this rational engineer who set out to build the world's tallest structure, made of new and completely exposed metals, gave Parisians, instead, a new orientation. The tower could be seen from all over Paris, and standing atop the tower allowed for a new view of their city--a sweeping, all encompassing, and universalizing view. I say universalizing, since when people are reduced to specks on the streets they are reduced to their essence, their simple humanity. Now
that is why the Eiffel Tower is romantic.
Some Parisians hated it, Guy de Maupassant, an author, used to eat at the restaurant every day, because he claimed it was the only place in the city where you couldn't see the tower. Seems like Barthes was right, though; instead of acting as a exercise in rationality for the 1889 World's Fair that would be dismantled at it's close, it gave the 19th Century Parisians a new way of seeing their city and each other. I guess that's an ok Prom theme. It just needs a subtitle. "Paris: Seeing Your Classmates in a New Way, like Nineteenth Century Parisians did During the 1889 World's Fair."
When I visited Paris a few years (that long!) ago, I was blown away by the tower. See? I'm literally falling over. That jacket is still in France...somewhere.
I left visiting it until my last day in the city, since I thought something that had become such a strange symbol had to be a cheesy tourist fest. And it was. Then the tower started sparkling, and I shut up. Good mistake, Eiffel. Here's my video from that day:
