The Eiffel Tower: The History of Paris' Most Famous Landmark
ISBN: 9781511735643
$9.99
*Includes pictures *Includes accounts of the construction written by Gustave Eiffel and others *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents “Being the most striking manifestation of the art of metal structures by which our engineers have shown in Europe, it is one of the most striking of our modern national genius.” – Gustave Eiffel It’s the home of kings, emperors, and aristocrats, and the home of the Champs-Élysées, the Bastille, the Louvre and the salons that fueled the Enlightenment. For foreigners like Benjamin Franklin, it was the most beautiful city in the world, and millions of people still visit those same sites every year. Known as the “City of Light,” Paris seamlessly blends its rich past with all the trappings of a modern city, and the city’s features and qualities are taken for granted today, but Paris was not always that way. In fact, it took nearly half a century of redesigning the city during the 19th century to transform it into the city it is today. Paris’s expansion also required new monuments, administrative buildings, and other public buildings. The urban renewal of Paris coincided with the Neoclassicism movement in art and architecture that had taken hold across Europe, which incorporated the classical architecture of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. All over Paris, builders constructed marble colored buildings with arches, pillars, domes, and neoclassical art that used the themes of antiquity.