Eiffel Tower changes its look - at least temporarily
Did you recognize it? The Eiffel Tower in Paris will change its exterior appearance temporarily by adding a horizontal extension to the top viewing platform. In order to overcome the increased amount of visitors, Parisian-based Serero Architects developed an amazing structure that adds to the famous landmark.
Celebrating the 120th birthday of one of the most famous city symbols and tourist attractions, the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel decided to restructure the public reception and access areas of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The reason is simple: the popularity of the tower unfortunately leads to the reach of its limit capacity, i.e. 6.5 million visitors, that wait between 35-70 minutes to reach the elevators. Very long waiting lines and crowd management problems are the consequences, since the tower geometry requires a decrease of floor area at each higher level. SERERO Architects proposed therefore the creation of a temporary horizontal extension to the third floor of the tower, in order to increase the quality of the access of the public as well as experiencing the 360 degrees sight of Paris.
The extension of the top floor plate will consist of a high performance carbon Kevlar structure, that will be temporarily bolted to the slab without requiring any modification of the existing structure. The usable floor area will expand from 280 to 580 square meters. The extension is composed of two slabs connected to the third floor deck as well as the upper level.
The architects further explain their design: The design is based on a generative script, creating branches out of the primary structure of the tower. Inspired by the structural concept of Eiffel of three-dimensional cross bracing beams, the script unfolds along curved lines the “DNA” of the tower. The script used the existing structure at the top of the tower ( a 10 by 10 meters cube) to generate 3 structural weaves, which are interconnected. These layers are combined to create a woven complex, which is based on the redundancy and the non-repetition of patterns to increase its structural performance. In opposition with modern engineering (based on the concept of repetition and optimization), the project for the Eiffel tower extension is based on an alternative model of high performance.
This is not the first optical modification of the famous tower, though. When Gustave Eiffel designed the tower, he imagined that it would become the support of a great variety of scientific devices and experimentations to study gravity and wind pressure. The structure of the tower was therefore designed for increase of its weight. During World War I, the tower was holding antennas to retransmit radio wave to the whole country. Structural simulation of the Eiffel tower indicates that it is a highly hyperstatic structure, which is dimensioned for a weight higher than what it is supporting today. “… the authentic laws of the energy are not always conformal with the secret laws of the harmony…” Gustave Eiffel