A shared wonder comes from the crowd and echoes around the grassy fields. Although the darkness pushes us all to the light like the draw of a campfire. My wife and sister-in-law and I wait patiently for the Eiffel Tower to light up and sparkle as it does on the hour. Cinegram Folie Le Parc de La Villette.Paris is warm on the autumn night we visit. “The Symbol of Paris”: Writing the Eiffel Tower. ‘Proposal for an Iron Tower: 300 Metres (sic) in Height’. Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England. ‘The Public Park as Avant-Garde (Landscape) Architecture: A Comparative Interpretation of Two Parisian Parks, Parc de la Villette (1983-1990) and Parc des Buttes-Chaumont (1864-1867)’. New York: Princeton Architectural Press 1998 ‘Creating Central Park’, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin.

New York: Princeton Architectural Press 2014 The Landscape Imagination: The Collected Essays of James Corner 1990 – 2010. Wilderness Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. By extruding the urban infrastructure up and giving people a sense of place and orientation, public venues provide places in which to gather and experience the city in more personal and dynamic ways.īarthes, R.1 La Tour Eiffel. With urban land at a premium, we should continue to look for opportunities to elevate the public park above the city landscape. I conclude by positing that every city needs a park like the Eiffel Tower. I will use Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette in Paris and the High Line in New York City as vehicles through which to study the Eiffel Tower’s role within landscape design’s general field and, more specifically, the development of the urban park. In this way, The Eiffel Tower becomes a precursor to our contemporary concept of the public park, one which challenges the idea of the ground plane and proposes a new concept of a secondary landscape elevated above the city streets. It is a landscape of layers and depth: providing framed views of the city on the ground, orienting one from miles away in all directions, elevating one far above the rooftops of Paris, and granting a bird’s eye view of the city. As a landscape architect, I am investigating the three-dimensional nature of the Eiffel Tower as a symbol of Paris, the Tower is both an infrastructural wonder and a three-dimensional public park.

The eiffel tower and other mythologies