The Eiffel Tower rises above Paris with such familiarity that it is difficult to imagine the city without it. Its lattice of iron has become part of the visual order of Paris, alongside the stone facades, the river, the bridges, and the great monuments created from earlier centuries. Yet, when the tower was proposed in the 1880s, many of the most distinguished artists and writers in France regarded it as an assault upon the city.
This disagreement is more interesting than the familiar lesson that critics sometimes fail to recognize great art. The Eiffel Tower belonged to a much larger nineteenth century argument about machines, cities, industry, and beauty. It challenged those critics to accept engineering as an aesthetic order of its own.
The Industrial Revolution altered Europe before anyone had quite learned how to understand it aesthetically. Mechanical looms, steam engines, trains, factories, and systems of production transformed labor. It also created (or was driven by the motivation) to create extraordinary wealth. As a byproduct, it created crowded industrial cities, dangerous working conditions, smoke, noise, poverty, and forms of human organization that seemed increasingly distant from the scale of the individual craftsman. The machines of the industrial revolution are more than one can observe in museums of industry today (for example the Henry Ford museum in Michigan).
Giosuè Carducci captured something of this ambiguity in his `Hymn to Satan,’ 1863. The steam locomotive appears simultaneously as beautiful and terrible. An emblem of technological progress advancing against an older religious-medieval order. The machine possessed power, speed, heat, smoke, and movement. It frightened those first observing because it was impressive as it cut a dividing line through the countryside.
Other contemporaries observed the transformation and saw degradation. Marx and Engels interpreted the industrial system primarily through labor, capital, and class. John Ruskin approached it through another direction. Industrialization represented a problem of beauty, craft, and human dignity, and not just an economic transformation. His admiration for Gothic architecture was connected to this viewpoint. For example, a medieval cathedral contained irregularity because it contained the work of many individual artisans. Then craftsman work was observed in the stone, unlike the repeated industrial operations on assembly lines. Ruskin identified a problem that remains with us as efficiency does not necessarily produce meaning.
The nineteenth century city made the conflict readily visible. Factories, rail yards, warehouses, chimneys, crowded housing, and new transportation networks altered the structure of London, Paris, Berlin, and other rapidly growing cities in the early industrial revolution. Writers and artists responded accordingly. For example, Dickens made industrial poverty part of the moral landscape of Victorian England. Doré showed a London of darkness, crowds, bridges, smoke, and disparities of wealth. Zola used mechanisms of the new industrial society as machinery in his novels.
For the Universal Exposition of 1889, Gustave Eiffel proposed a tower of iron rising approximately 300 meters above Paris. Nothing comparable had ever been constructed. Unlike previous building efforts, it was not a classical monument. The internal structure was almost entirely visible. The static force balance was visible to the eye from all angles.
In 1887 a group of prominent writers, painters, musicians, and architects protested the tower publicly. Among them were Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas fils, Charles Gounod, and Charles Garnier – architect of the Paris Opera. They imagined the tower as an enormous factory chimney imposed upon a city whose beauty had been produced through centuries of stone architecture.
Imagine Paris without knowledge of what the Eiffel Tower would be. Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the churches, bridges, and ordered facades all belonged, however differently, to architectural traditions. Into this city would suddenly rise an exposed iron framework taller than any structure ever built.
Eiffel’s viewpoint relied upon a different conception of beauty. Engineering, he argued, was not outside harmony. A structure could possess elegance because its form followed physical necessity. Beauty in this viewpoint relied on strength, proportion, efficiency, and boldness. Its visual form and its structural form are intimately connected.
A bridge can be beautiful because the path of its loads is intelligible. An aircraft wing can possess beauty because its form reconciles lift, drag, structure, weight, stability, manufacturability, and countless practical constraints. A turbine blade, a ship hull, or even the internal geometry of a fluid passage may contain an order that is almost invisible to someone who does not know the problem being solved.
One cannot always say that what functions well is beautiful. Factories could operate efficiently while producing miserable surroundings. Cities could become economically productive while becoming physically degrading. A machine may solve one problem while creating another. Ruskin’s criticism remains even with the survival and celebration of Eiffel’s tower.
We might question what kind of order machines produce, and what they ask human beings to surrender in obtaining function. Today the Eiffel Tower’s structure, once denounced as an industrial monstrosity, became inseparable from Paris itself. What was ugly is now beautiful, and what was alien became familiar.
Perception changed as well, and people learned to see and live with iron differently. Industrial construction introduced another vocabulary, based on iron, steel, glass, tension, compression, repetition, and increasingly large spans.
The nineteenth century suspicion of the industrial city never disappeared. Twentieth century writers and thinkers continued to describe the metropolis as both liberation and imprisonment. Alfred Döblin’s `Berlin Alexanderplatz’ presents the modern city as a harsh system of crowds, machines, commerce, violence, and chance. Adorno viewed much of modern mass culture with suspicion. Joyce turned Dublin into the immense human landscape of Ulysses, where the modern city becomes simultaneously comic, vulgar, intimate, frustrating, and magnificent – a simultaneous inferno and paradise.
This is the lesson of industrial ugliness. Technology changes the conditions in which beauty can be recognized. A civilization should not judge its machines only by whether they work, or its cities only by whether they grow. Technical accomplishment is real, and sometimes beautiful. Yet the final measure remains human. What sort of world has been created around the machine, and what sort of life is possible within it?
References
- G. Carducci, A Satana. Pistoia, Italy: Società Tipografica Pistoiese Carducci, Bongiovanni, 1867.
- K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. London, U.K.: Office der Bildungs-Gesellschaft für Arbeiter, 1848.
- J. Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” in The Stones of Venice, vol. II, The Sea-Stories. London, Smith, Elder and Co., 1853, pp. 151-230.
- C. Dickens, Hard Times: For These Times. London, U.K.: Bradbury & Evans, 1854.
- G. Doré and B. Jerrold, London: A Pilgrimage. London, U.K.: Grant & Co., 1872.
- É. Zola, Germinal. Paris, France: G. Charpentier et Cie, 1885.
- E. Meissonier et al., “Protestation des artistes contre la tour de M. Eiffel,” Le Temps, pp. 3–6, Feb. 14, 1887.
- G. Eiffel, Interview by P. Bourde, Le Temps, Feb. 14, 1887.
- A. Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf. Berlin, Germany: S. Fischer Verlag, 1929.
- M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Querido Verlag, 1947.
- J. Joyce, Ulysses. Paris, France: Shakespeare and Company, 1922.