Eiffel Tower
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Eiffel Tower
It’s hard to believe that the Eiffel Tower (RER Champ de Mars-Tour Eiffel) the quintessential symbol both of Paris and the brilliance of industrial engineering, was designed to be a temporary structure for a fair. Late nineteenth-century Europe had a taste for giant-scale, colonialist-capitalist extravaganzas, but Paris’s 1889 Exposition Universelle was particularly ambitious: When completed, the tower, at 300mm, was the tallest building in the world. Outraged critics protested against his “grimy factory chimney”. “Is Paris,” they asked, “going to be associated with the grotesque, mercantile imaginings of a constructor of machines?” Eiffel himself thought it was a piece of architectural perfection. “The basic lines of a structure must correspond precisely to its specified use,” he said. “To a certain extent the tower was formed by the wind itself.”
Curiously, this most celebrated of landmarks was only saved from demolition by the sudden need for “wireless telegraphy” aerials in the first decade of the twentieth century. The tower’s role in telecommunications – its only function apart from tourism – has only become more important, and the original crown is now masked by an efflorescence of antennae. Over the last century, the structure has seen some surprising cosmetic changes; the original deep red paint scheme has been covered up with a sober, dusty-chocolate brown since the late 1960s – at least the city is spared the canary yellow that covered the tower for most of its first decade. The only structural maintenance it has ever needed was carried out in the 1980s, when one thousand tones of metal were removed to make the tower ten percent lighter, and the frame was readjusted to remove a slight warp.
Outside daylight hours, distinctive sodium lights now light up the structure, and a double searchlight was added for the millennium celebrations, making its first sweep at midnight on December 31. Its twin xenon arc-lamps have turned the tower into an oversized urban lighthouse. For the first ten minutes of every hour thousands of effervescent lights now scramble and fizz about the structure, defin ing the famous silhouette in luminescent champagne.
Going up (daily: mid-June to Sept 9-12am; Sept to mid-June 9.30am-11.45pm) cost €11.50 (for the top; access closes at 11pm), €7.80 (second level) or €4.50 (first level); you can also climb the stairs as fas as the second level for a mere €4, though note that from September to mid-June access to the stairs closes at 6pm. Paris look surreally microscopic from the top and the views are arguably better from the second level, especially on hazier days. But there’s something irresistible about taking the lift all the way up. The view is, of course, the main attraction, buit you can also peer through a window into Eiffel’s airy little shoe-off study, at very top, while at the second level is the gastronomic restaurant, Jules Verne.
