Eiffel Tower Confidential
What It Meant and What It Stands For
Format:Hardback
Publisher:The University of Chicago Press
Publishing:22nd Feb '27
£20.00
This title is due to be published on 22nd February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A revelatory behind-the-scenes look at a universally recognized landmark: the Eiffel Tower.
The Eiffel Tower is widely photographed, visited, and written about, but it holds a wealth of stories that are rarely told. When it was built, the three-hundred-meter structure was the tallest on earth, but it bore little resemblance to the stripped-down, modernized monument that is known and loved today. With Eiffel Tower Confidential, art historian Hollis Clayson makes this familiar landmark strange again, offering expert insight into the life of the Tower.
Here she traces the creative financing of the Tower before its construction began, shares images made in its early years, and illuminates the role the Tower played in celebrating French Imperialism. She tells the fascinating story of iron ornamentation that helped the Tower win approval as the centerpiece of the 1889 Universal Exposition but was ripped off and discarded in 1937, and she investigates the sinister backstory behind how the dazzling illumination of the Tower—which combined 10,000 gas lights in glass globes, two kinds of electric spotlights placed at the summit, and Bengal flames on the platforms—was designed to function as an instrument of surveillance.
This extraordinary account takes us into the long shadow of the Eiffel Tower, inviting readers to get to know this acclaimed landmark on an unprecedented level.
“This lively book, by an authority on nineteenth-century France, traces the complex shadow of the Eiffel Tower, revealing the contested beauty of prefabricated iron, its lost decorative exuberance, its place in displays of empire, and its appearance at night. Gustave Eiffel’s monumental gateway built for the Exposition of 1889 has a darker form that nonetheless occupies a towering place in our visual culture.”
-- Amy F. Ogata, author of "Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America"“Clayson's Eiffel Tower Confidential is a tour-de-force by a preeminent contemporary writer on French nineteenth-century visual culture and a delight to read. Clayson shines her historian's light on some of the more controversial, and little-known aspects of the Eiffel Tower's history, and in so doing makes it clear why the iron leviathan that has soared over Paris for more than a century has become a ubiquitous image of the capital and indeed of the French nation.”
-- Kevin D. Murphy, author of "The Cathedral of Notre-Dame of Paris: A Quick Immersion"“What more can possibly be said about the Eiffel Tower, the soaring icon of countless photographs, postcards, and bright memories? Clayson, it turns out, has plenty to relate about the Tower’s funding, its admirers and detractors, the rancor, accolades, and imitations it inspired, and the many contested meanings it gathered as decade after decade passed below it.”
-- Sandy Isenstadt, author of "Electric Light: An Architectural HistISBN: 9780226856230
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
128 pages