Photo by Petter Hegre: Anna S Eiffel Tower Park (2009)
I'm on the top, with the jump, jumping to my death,
It's Paris - La Tour Eiffel - the sexiest building left.
Located on the Champ de Mars, La Tour Eiffel is a 320-metre puddle iron construction, weighing some 10,000 tonnes. Erected in 1889, it was named after the engineer, Gustave Eiffel, who oversaw the design and construction.
Initially, many critics - including artists and intellectuals - opposed the building of the Tower. Some feared it would dominate the Parisian skyline and overshadow other much-loved monuments; others derided the proposed structure on the grounds that it lacked any serious purpose or function. Indeed, the Tower's uselessness and frivolity was felt by many to be something of a scandal in an age which prided itself on its utility and seriousness. However, once built it proved an immediate success with the French public and quickly became a global attraction.
As one of the most recognisable objects on earth, this empty monument has received millions of visitors, served as the architectural inspiration for at least thirty similar towers around the world and featured in numerous films and photographs as an iconic and romantic symbol of the city in which it stands.
Indeed, in a very real sense, La Tour Eiffel is Paris and Paris is La Tour Eiffel and wherever you are in the city you must, as Roland Barthes points out, take endless precautions if you don't wish to see the Tower: whatever time of day, whatever season of the year, whatever might obscure your view and isolate you from it, the Tower is always there. Silently persisting, "it is as literal as a phenomenon of Nature whose meaning can be questioned to infinity but whose existence is incontestable."
Indeed, in a very real sense, La Tour Eiffel is Paris and Paris is La Tour Eiffel and wherever you are in the city you must, as Roland Barthes points out, take endless precautions if you don't wish to see the Tower: whatever time of day, whatever season of the year, whatever might obscure your view and isolate you from it, the Tower is always there. Silently persisting, "it is as literal as a phenomenon of Nature whose meaning can be questioned to infinity but whose existence is incontestable."
But just as every Parisian is obliged to encounter and acknowledge the Tower, so are we all: for it has become present to the entire world, in our dreams and fantasies. Almost the question arises not why some individuals are sexually attracted to the Tower, but why isn't everyone aroused by this virtually pure signifier that paradoxically means everything?
For La Tour Eiffel excites like no other structure on earth. It is the supreme object and it affords us a multiplicity of pleasures: we can fall in love beneath it and we can fall to our deaths from the top of it. One way or another, it thus promises bliss and stands in all its mysterious thingliness forever beyond human reason.
