Symbol of Paris, modernity, communication, science, or the 19th century, a rocket, a stem, an oil platform, a phallus, a lightning rod, or an insect, the Eiffel Tower is the inevitable landmark facing the grand routes of dreams.

In order to fulfill this grand dreamlike function, which transforms it into a kind of holistic monument, the Tower must escape logic. The first condition of this victorious escape is the fact that the Tower exists as a monument utterly useless. The uselessness of the Tower has always been faintly felt as a scandal, that is, as a precious and unconfessed truth.

It managed to fully become the symbol of Paris only when it was able to lift from itself the burden of the past and at the same time become the symbol of modernity. The assault it imposed on the Parisian landscape (highlighted by the gathering of signatures from artists) was fierce. The Tower proved to be, along with Paris itself, a symbol of creative boldness, representing the modern gesture with which the present says no to the past.

Metallurgy, transportation, democracy: Eiffel offered, through his Tower, the material symbol of these three achievements to his century. A battle was fought “in the name of the undervalued French taste,” an appeal was made to “the soul of France,” and “the baroque and commercial fantasies of a maker of machines” were implicated.

The vertical expansion of a monument could not be achieved by an architect but by a technician. The Tower thus establishes the superiority of pure technique over the objects (the buildings) that until then were subjected (at least in part) to art.

-R.B.