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Architecture Review - Renzo Piano Embraces Chicago - NYTimes.com

The New York Times' Nicolai Ouroussof's review of Renzo Piano's new addition to the Art Institute of Chicago.... more

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Eiffel Tower, From Loathed to Loved

"On May 15, the Eiffel Tower, the world's most celebrated monument and the iconic symbol of Paris, celebrates its 120th anniversary. Strikingly, the fame and allure of this improbable wrought-iron masterpiece have only grown with the passing decades. The tower, built by railway-bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel, has become a ubiquitous global image connoting modernity and glamour, while visitors who experience it firsthand are still amazed by the tower's potent mixture of spare elegance, immensity and complexity. And when the Eiffel Tower opens to its adoring public each day, the structure comes to life as crowds gaily clamber up and down its stairs, eating, drinking and flirting on the three platforms high in the sky. Open to the elements, enveloped in Eiffel's distinctive design, visitors can see and touch parts of the 18,038 pieces of iron (welded together with 2.5 million rivets) as they ascend heavenward.

The tower is so beloved that few today remember the storm of vitriol, mockery and lawsuits provoked by its selection as the startling centerpiece of the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. (One of the losing entries was a gigantic working guillotine!) Even as Eiffel was breaking ground by the Seine River in February 1887, 47 of France's greatest names decried in a letter to Le Temps the "odious column of bolted metal." What person of good taste, this flock of intellectuals asked, could endure the thought of this "dizzily ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a black and gigantic factory chimney, crushing [all] beneath its barbarous mass"? The revered painters Ernest Meissonier and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, writers Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas fils, composer Charles Gounod and architect Charles Garnier all signed this epistolary call to arms, stating that "the Eiffel Tower, which even commercial America would not have, is without a doubt the dishonor of Paris."

The Americans did not hide their chagrin when they learned that at 1,000 feet the Eiffel Tower would dethrone their own 555-foot-tall Washington Monument, finally completed in 1884. Sniffed the New York Times' Paris correspondent: "The French admit [the tower's] originality and value, but they deplore its ugliness . . . au fond, they are not proud to show this gigantic iron structure to strangers. . . . [T]hey vote it an abomination and eyesore." The Timesman insisted that the Washington Monument is "after all, more artistic than the Eiffel Tower." In truth, as the Eiffel Tower rose gracefully into the Parisian sky, its unique modern beauty catapulted it to world acclaim. An entire industry rushed to churn out Eiffel Tower replicas, as Phillip Cate notes in his book "Eiffel Tower: A Tour de Force" -- tiny gold charms, solid chocolate confections, giant garden ornaments, or the myriad images executed in "pen, pencil, and brush, in photo and lithography, in oil and pastel, on paper, canvas, on wood and ivory, on china, steel, and zinc."

From the day the Eiffel Tower first opened on May 15, 1889, at 11:50 a.m., fairgoers flocked to ascend its giddy heights. From high up, they savored the spectacle of Paris looking tiny and the crowds down below coursing through the rococo Exposition, enjoying such novelties as Egyptian belly dancing, Japanese tea houses, Javanese dancers, wine from the world's largest oaken cask (pulled to Paris by 10 pair of oxen), and the miracle of recorded sound at the Edison exhibit...""On May 15, the Eiffel Tower, the world's most celebrated monument and the iconic symbol of Paris, celebrates its 120th... more