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The Eiffel Tower: State of the Construction
23 November 1888
- Classification
- Museum
- Wikimedia Commons
- Credit line
- The Getty Center, Object 61770 This image was taken from the Getty Research Institute's Open Content Program, which states the following regarding their assessment that no known copyright restrictions exist: Open content images are…
- Rights
- Public domain, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
About this work
The Centennial Exposition of 1889 was organized by the French government to commemorate the French Revolution. Bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel's 984-foot (300-meter) tower of open-lattice wrought iron was selected in a competition to erect a memorial at the exposition. Twice as high as the dome of St. Peter's in Rome or the Great Pyramid of Giza, nothing like it had ever been built before. This view was made about four months short of the tower's completion. Louis-Émile Durandelle photographed the tower from a low vantage point to emphasize its monumentality. The massive building barely visible in the far distance is dwarfed under the tower's arches.
Incidentally, the tower's innovative glass-cage elevators, engineered to ascend on a curve, were designed by the Otis Elevator Company of New York, the same company that designed the Getty Center's diagonally ascending tram.
