The Eiffel Tower: Beautiful Things Last
I've been to Paris a few times now and every time I go back I make a point of seeing the Eiffel Tower. Something about it keeps pulling me in. I was lucky enough to go see it again about a week ago, and the thing that amazed me the most this time were the rivets weirdly enough. There’s 2.5 million of them, visible from the ground, holding together a structure so large you can't take it in from a single angle. You find yourself wondering who designed each joint. Who calculated the load. Who decided where every single piece went, by hand, on paper, in the 1880s. And then who actually got up there and built it.
What makes it stranger is that the original design wasn't even meant to look like this. The initial concept was purely structural, a massive pylon, a lattice of iron beams reaching for the sky. Functional, impressive in scale, but nothing more. An architect named Stephen Sauvestre was brought in to make it more than just a technical exercise. He added the grand decorative arches at the base, which actually serve no structural purpose, purely to visually anchor the tower to the ground. Nobody asked for it to be beautiful. He decided it should be anyway, and that's why we’re still talking about it.
The Tower was built for the 1889 World's Fair and was supposed to come down after twenty years. It survived because it became useful as a radio transmitter, intercepting German military communications during World War I. Kept alive by function, after being built with beauty.
I don't think we do this way anymore. Walk around Paris and the contrast is obvious. The old buildings have an artfulness to them that the glass and steel boxes nearby don't. Modern construction is optimised for cost, speed, floor area. No one in some corporate boardroom is arguing for beauty. You see it everywhere once you start looking. Cars are the most obvious example. The Ford Capri meant something once. The new one, the electric SUV they've stuck the name on, is a repackaging job with none of the original's personality. The Mach-E is the same story. A name borrowed from something people actually loved, attached to something nobody will remember. It's not just lazy design, it's a kind of disrespect and I think it will damage brands’ reputations in the long run. But it's not universal, and companys like Renault are proving that. The new 5, the 4, and the Twingo, are cars with character and a point of view, that feel like someone cared about how they looked. It is possible, some people are just choosing not to bother.
I'm only in college right now so my projects don't have the constraints that real briefs do, budget, manufacturing, timelines, a client who wants it cheaper. But I do think about it already. Because the pressure to strip things back, to cut what can't be justified on a spreadsheet, that's what kills beauty in design. And it'll be a pressure I'll face constantly in the future.
Millennials took beautiful old furniture and painted it grey. Stripped Victorian houses back to something that looked like a hospital waiting room and called it minimalism, and I think (and hope) that my generation is reacting against that. There's a growing appreciation for things made with care, with the assumption that the person using them deserves something considered. Whether it's a trend or something more genuine, the end result is the same. The world looks a bit better for it.
I left Paris thinking about what it means to make something that lasts. The Eiffel Tower was supposed to be a temporary exhibit. It outlived its purpose, its critics, and its demolition order. Beautiful things tend to do that.
