Chapter 8
Dismissed by critics as a “tragic street lamp,” the Eiffel Tower was deemed so ugly that Parisian intellectuals thought even boorish and bovine Americans would be repelled by its crude iron visage. Built for Paris’s Exposition Universelle of 1889, the tower’s design had somehow won over judges in a contest that drew possibly 700 entries, including plans for a colossal watering can and a 1,000-foot-high guillotine.
Despite the official imprimatur, an outraged mélange of 300 artists, architects, and writers petitioned the expo’s commissioner to pull up the plan for the “ridiculous tower” like a limp weed. Author Guy de Maupassant deemed it a “giant and disgraceful skeleton.” In their “Protest against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel,” a gaggle of artists and intellectuals, including de Maupassant and Alexander Dumas, spewed their furious objections. Published in the newspaper Le Temps in 1887, it read “We . . . protest with all our strength and all our indignation . . . the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower which popular ill-feeling, so often an arbiter of good sense and justice, has already christened the Tower of Babel . . . To comprehend what we are arguing one only needs to imagine for a moment a tower of ridiculous vertiginous height dominating Paris, just like a gigantic black factory chimney, its barbarous mass overwhelming and humiliating all our monuments and belittling our works of architecture, which will just disappear before this stupefying folly.”
After the expo opened, the 1,063-foot-tall metal monolith (its height now includes the antenna at the top), made of 18,000 pieces, drew near-unanimous acclaim from attendees, including Thomas Edison and Buffalo Bill Cody. Originally slated to be torn down after 20 years, the tower endured, because, starting in 1903, the French military realized its stature made the 10,000-ton structure a superlative radio post. (Later, the French captured enemy communications from it during World War I.) Its height also made the tower the ideal spot for transmitting France’s first public radio program in 1925.
“Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough,” mused the ripened—and repellent—Noah Cross in Chinatown. Far from ugly, hardly ridiculous, defiantly more than a tragic street lamp, the Eiffel Tower has lasted almost 130 years, earning compound interest on its respectability. Welcoming its 250-millionth visitor in 2010, the tower is as exhilarating as a triple shot of espresso to the 7 million a year who visit it.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Ranging from two years to three months, the shelf life of world’s fairs effectively made their thousands of constructions as impermanent as Post-Its. The built-in brevity was an unintended mercy for pavilions that looked like their designers routinely said “Hail, Hydra” a lot.
But there are others, which, despite a longevity that was the 180-degree opposite of the Eiffel Tower, stayed fixed in viewers’ minds, as if painted there with the same brush Monet used for the Palazzo Dario in Venice, or the one de Chirico brandished for his Metaphysical Town Square series. Take, for example, the United Kingdom’s 66-foot-tall “Seed Cathedral” at Expo 2010 in Shanghai: Looking at first glance like a cyborg porcupine, the pavilion consisted of 60,000 thin 24.5-foot-long translucent acrylic tubes that waved like an insect’s antennae in the wind. Glowing at night, the tubes appeared lighter at their tips, creating the illusion that the structure was fading from this reality into another, where perhaps buildings are as alive as the people inside them.
Or consider China Vanke Co. Ltd.’s pavilion from Expo 2015 in Milan: Conceived by the illustrious architect Daniel Libeskind, the pavilion resembled a massive serpent coiled and ready to launch itself into the open sky. Built for the largest residential real estate company in China, it was covered in 4,000 scale-like ceramic tiles whose fractal patterns cause the “skin” of the 45-pound plates to flow softly from the color of flame to shades of honey in the sun.
Eiffel, however, wasn’t the only savant to engineer a building as perpetual as Mount Rushmore. The world expos offered a blank canvas for a dazzling array of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries’ architectural savants, Frederick Law Olmsted’s jungly Jackson Park lagoon for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition . . . Bernard Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts, inspired by a Piranesi engraving of Roman ruins, for the 1915–1916 Panama-Pacific International Exposition . . . Mies van der Rohe’s spartan Barcelona Pavilion (aka the German Pavilion) for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, done in clean planes of red onyx and travertine marble from the Swiss Alps and the Mediterranean, as if it were built for a monastery of geometricians. (Torn down after the fair, the pavilion was reconstructed from photographs in the 1980s by Spanish architects.)
World’s fairs didn’t just launch buildings that stood the test of time, they also debuted architects who lassoed the world’s imagination.
Without a world’s fair to propel him from nobody to luminary, Antoni Gaudi might have ended up slogging through life as a boilermaker like his father and grandfather before him. In 1878, soon after receiving his degree, Gaudi was commissioned by the Hermes-level-of-lux Comella glove factory in Barcelona to design its display case for the 1878 Paris Exposition Universelle. The young architect’s design—a sophisticated construct of carved oak, elegant forged iron, and strangely shaped decorative glass panes—struck one attendee, Catalan industrialist Eusebi Güell, so deeply that he hired Gaudi to work on his estate and palace. He became to Gaudi what Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, was to Leonardo: a long-term patron who protected and nurtured him as a hothouse does an orchid. Besides his work on the Güell Pavilions, Gaudi’s architectural resume included the Episcopal Palace, Casa de los Botines, Casa Calvet, Cascada Fountain at Parc de la Ciutadella, El Capricho, and Sagrada Família, all monuments to what stone would look like if it could drop acid.