Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower, a lattice iron tower was built on the Champ de Mars in Paris as the centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, which marked the centenary of the French Revolution. It was spearheaded by the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose prior projects, including the dramatic iron Garabit viaduct railway bridge (1880-85) and the iron skeleton of Fr�d�ric-Auguste Bartholdi’s statue of Liberty (1883), had won him fame.

Known almost from the very start as La Tour Eiffel after its originator, the astute engineer Gustave Eiffel, the renowned tour de trois cents m�tres was the winning entry (out of 107) in a French government competition for a 300 m tower. It was created as centerpiece of the French capital’s fourth World’s Fair since mid-century.

As the tallest structure on earth in 1889, the Eiffel Tower outdid its nearest competitor: a 169 m stone obelisk across the Atlantic, the Washington Monument (on the National Mall in Washington, DC), completed in 1884 but not dedicated until 1888. The Tower remained the world’s tallest construction until the United States regained the title with the slightly taller Chrysler Building (319 m) in New York City in 1930.

It was certainly Eiffel’s experience and track record that helped him to win the competition, but the famous Tower is not attributable to Eiffel alone. The trio of two chief engineers in Eiffel’s office, Maurice Koechlin (1856-1946) and Emile Nouguier (1840-1897) and the architect Stephen Sauvestre (1847-1919) drew up the project that was submitted to and won the competition. The final structure was an elaboration of Koechlin’s uncompromisingly minimalist pylon of 1884, richly ornamented by Sauvestre.

A little-studied 20th-century “modernization” transformed a significant portion of tower’s exterior. While its lighting has been altered repeatedly over the decades, the silhouette and overall visual personality of the 1889 iron titan were fundamentally changed in 1937. The modification was a stylistic update; the Tower was to appear less old-fashioned in the context of that year’s self-consciously modern Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne.

In the annals of architectural history, the Tower’s structural daring (wind resistance as well as height and shape), metal construction, and largely industrial aesthetic vocabulary, allow it to be considered as a key example of modern engineering architecture