The Eiffel tower with the Seine river in the foreground.
My first visit to the Eiffel tower was in 1981 as a fresh graduate structural engineer. At that time, i sat there and marveled at the engineering aspect of this structure. Just imagine in the 1800s there was already technology to design and build a project of this magnitude!! Somehow i always felt that the underlying reason why the french built this iconic structure was to show off to their british counterpart as we know the french and brits always at loggerhead after the battle of waterloo :) Since then i had always wanted to return to the site of this fascinating project..........i guess to ponder some more as i have not manage find an answer back then.
So really how does one view the Eiffel tower??? 
Is it a work of art??
or an engineering marvel??
Guess the answer will vary from person to person depending which discipline you are from.
This time around for me I think it's a master piece whichever way you look at it. It was design and built to make its mark in history and has become an icon of Paris if not france.
Some staggering facts of the tower. It is made from 7000 tonnes of steel members, 2.5million rivets and took slightly more than two years to built which is really very short for such a gigantic project in the 1800s indicating highly skilled project management capability. The contractor who built the tower was Gustav Eiffel but i feel that there should be recognition given to others who were also very involved in this project......such as the architect Stephen Sauvestre and the engineers Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier without which the design and construction of the tower will not be possible.
The tower is repainted every 7 years or thereabout and 50 tons of paint will be used each time!!
Hopefully the weight of the paint will not cause the tower to buckle and collapse in centuries to come.....solly lar.......me watching GI joe too many times over and over again!!
the Eiffel tower as seen from Montmartre.
i like the rustic color of the tower. Gives that aged feeling!
my favorite view of the Eiffel tower. Something nostalgic about this picture.
By the way monkey is away in Langkawi so you will hear more from me the next couple of days.....hopefully i won't mess up her blog.....hehe :)
7 comments:
marvelous pic!!
MC: thank u thank u......excited bout HK yet? :)))) eat more yea!!!!
beeeee-u-ti-ful!
Txs guys for dropping by. The Eiffel must be one of the most photographed objects so really its quite difficult to come up with a unique composition........I like the one that monkey posted in nov 2010.......I suspect that was phothshopped by combining the gate and tower cos no such gate at trocadero when we were there in dec :))
JS: I think we didn't look harder for that door/gate at Trocadero
Wow! You did it again :) Excellent photography skills you got:)
The photos are truly amazing!
Thanks May :)))
How was your trip?
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