Tower and Glory
Engineering mastery spawned a new kind of beauty in Eiffel's creation
Koechlin's tower was spare, an iron skeleton like a giant oil derrick or, more to the point, a bridge pier. (Grace notes, including decorative arches under the first platform, were added later, by an architect.) In effect, Koechlin was building on what he had learned from the master. Eiffel had started his first railway bridge, over the Garonne River at Bordeaux, when he was only 26, and by 1884 his iron lattice bridges were all over France and Europe. His masterpiece, the Garabit viaduct in the Massif Central mountains, was being completed as Koechlin drew the tower. It was supported by giant piers and a central arch that rose 400 feet above the Truyere River. It was an audacious, spidery thing that only Eiffel had the know-how to attempt--and it was the model for the tower. (The bridge is still in use and is a tourist attraction in its own right.) "The solutions to the problems the tower posed had already been worked out for the bridges," says Miriam Levin, a historian of technology at Case Western Reserve University. "They weren't going to do anything too experimental in the middle of Paris."
The great threat to any tall structure is wind; in 1879, gales had toppled the Tay Bridge in Scotland, dropping a train and 75 passengers into the Firth of Tay. Eiffel's solution, at Garabit and on the Champ de Mars, was to stiffen his structures with lacy truss work that gave the wind nothing to push on. Amazingly, the Eiffel Tower is even more delicate than it looks. The 16 columns that support it, forming the corners of its four legs, are actually hollow. All the wrought iron in the tower weighs about 7,300 metric tons, less than what the air in an imaginary cylinder big enough to hold the tower would weigh.
Eiffel's other answer to the wind was the tower's distinctive tapering shape. It was not an artistic choice; it was dictated by a mathematical analysis of the forces involved. The shape is such that the push of the wind on any given section of the tower combines with the weight above that section to create a force pointing down one of the curving uprights, thus channeling the load safely to the ground. "Before coming together at the high pinnacle," he wrote, "the uprights appear to burst out of the ground, and in a way to be shaped by the action of the wind."
Barbarous. The master engineering helped to create a new kind of beauty in which structure revealed itself proudly--and when those uprights first started bursting from the Champ de Mars, Parisian artists howled. A few dozen of them drafted a public protest, pointing out--among other low blows--that even "commercial America" had not wanted a structure so "vertiginously ridiculous" and "barbarous." One of the few signatories whose name is still well known outside France, Guy de Maupassant, later wrote that he had left Paris because he couldn't stand the sight of the tower.
Eiffel couldn't understand the criticism. "The first principle of architectural aesthetics," he wrote in a reply to the artists, "is that the essential lines of a monument should be dictated by a perfect adaptation to its purpose." Or as the American architect Louis Sullivan would put it a decade later, in what became the dictum of modernist architecture: "Form ever follows function." Hindsight has vindicated Eiffel and made his critics look ridiculous.
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