“They didn’t want it but he built it any­way” — The Pix­ies, “Alec Eif­fel”

When the Eif­fel Tow­er — gate­way to the Paris World’s Fair and cen­ten­ni­al mark­er of the Rev­o­lu­tion — was first designed and built, it was far from beloved. Its cre­ator, Alexan­dre Gus­tave Eif­fel, an engi­neer known for build­ing bridges, faced wide­spread con­dem­na­tion, both from the city’s cre­ative class and in the pop­u­lar press. French writer Guy de Mau­pas­sant summed up the pre­vail­ing sen­ti­ment when he called Eif­fel “a boil­er­mak­er with delu­sions of grandeur.”

Before con­struc­tion began, Mau­paus­sant joined a com­mis­sion of 300 artists, archi­tects, and promi­nent cit­i­zens who opposed in a let­ter what they imag­ined as “a gid­dy, ridicu­lous tow­er dom­i­nat­ing Paris like a gigan­tic black smoke­stack…. [A]ll of our humil­i­at­ed mon­u­ments will dis­ap­pear in this ghast­ly dream.” One crit­ic wrote of it as a “hideous col­umn with rail­ings, this infundibu­li­form chick­en wire, glo­ry to the wire and the slab, arrow of Notre-Dame of bric-a-brac.…”

To these objec­tions, Eif­fel cooly replied it made no sense to judge a build­ing sole­ly from its plans. He also repeat­ed his promise: the tow­er, he said, would sym­bol­ize “not only the art of the mod­ern engi­neer, but also the cen­tu­ry of indus­try and sci­ence in which we are liv­ing.” His “unapolo­get­i­cal­ly indus­tri­al lan­guage,” writes Archi­tiz­er, “did not please all.” But Eif­fel did not boast in vain. When com­plet­ed, the tow­er stood almost twice as high as the Wash­ing­ton Mon­u­ment, then the tallest build­ing in the world at 555 feet.

Not only extreme­ly tall for its time, the Eif­fel Tow­er was also very intri­cate. It would be made of 18,000 wrought iron pieces held togeth­er with 2.5 mil­lion riv­ets, with four curved iron piers con­nect­ed by a lat­tice of gird­ers. After care­ful cal­cu­la­tions, the tow­er’s curves were designed to offer the max­i­mum amount of effi­cient wind resis­tance. 

In the video just above, you can see the tower’s incred­i­ble con­struc­tion from August 1887 to March 1889, mod­eled in an ani­mat­ed time­lapse ani­ma­tion. Its design has far out­last­ed its orig­i­nal­ly short lifes­pan. Slat­ed to be torn down after 20 years, the tow­er stands as tall as ever, though it’s been dwarfed sev­er­al times over by struc­tures that would appall the sig­na­to­ries against Gus­tave Eif­fel in 1887.

Indeed, it is impos­si­ble now to imag­ine Paris with­out Eiffel’s cre­ation. Mau­pas­sant, how­ev­er, spent his life try­ing to do just that. He report­ed­ly had his lunch in the tower’s restau­rant every day, since it was the only place in Paris one could not see it.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Paris in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Eif­fel Tow­er, Notre Dame, The Pan­théon, and More (1890)

Build­ing The Eif­fel Tow­er: Three Google Exhi­bi­tions Revis­it the Birth of the Great Parisian Mon­u­ment

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

Mod­ernist archi­tec­ture trans­formed the mod­ern city in the 20th cen­tu­ry, for good and ill. Nowhere is this trans­for­ma­tion more evi­dent than the for­mer Sovi­et Union and its for­mer republics. There, we find truth in the west­ern stereo­types of the Sovi­et city as cold, face­less, and soul-crush­ing­ly non­de­script — so much so that the plot of a 1975 Russ­ian TV film called The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!, hinges on a man drunk­en­ly trav­el­ing to Leningrad by mis­take and falling asleep in a stranger’s apart­ment, think­ing it’s his own place in Moscow. Rus­sians found the joke so relat­able, they began a tra­di­tion of watch­ing the film each year on Christ­mas, as the City Beau­ti­ful above video on Sovi­et urban archi­tec­ture points out.

Once it had elim­i­nat­ed pri­vate prop­er­ty, the exper­i­ment of the Sovi­et Union began with good inten­tions, archi­tec­tural­ly-speak­ing. Con­struc­tivism, the first form of dis­tinct­ly Sovi­et archi­tec­ture, was devel­oped first as an art move­ment by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexan­der Rod­chenko. Con­struc­tivists sought to bal­ance the nation’s need to build tons of new hous­ing under harsh eco­nom­ic con­di­tions with “ambi­tion for using the built envi­ron­ment to engi­neer soci­etal changes and instill the avant-garde in every­day life,” points out the Design­ing Build­ings Wiki. Draw­ing from Bauhaus and Futur­ism, the move­ment only last­ed into the 1930s. Many of its finest designs went unre­al­ized, but it left a sig­nif­i­cant mark on sub­se­quent archi­tec­tur­al move­ments like Bru­tal­ism.

The syn­the­sis of beau­ty and util­i­ty would fall apart, how­ev­er, under the mas­sive col­lec­tiviz­ing dri­ves of Stal­in. When his reign end­ed, pub­lic hous­ing blocks known as “Krushchy­ovkas” sprang up, named after the pre­mier “who ini­ti­at­ed their mass pro­duc­tion in the late 1950s,” writes Mark Byrnes at Bloomberg City­Lab. This was “a dis­tinct­ly banal archi­tec­tur­al type” built quick­ly and cheap­ly when Moscow “had twice the pop­u­la­tion its hous­ing stock could accom­mo­date. Five-sto­ry Krush­choyvkas popped up in new­ly planned microdis­tricts.” These, as you’ll see in the explain­er video, could be added on to exist­ing cities indef­i­nite­ly for max­i­mal urban sprawl “in hopes of alle­vi­at­ing the severe hous­ing cri­sis exac­er­bat­ed under Joseph Stal­in.”

As the pop­u­lar­i­ty of The Irony of Fate demon­strates, Krush­choyvkas intro­duced seri­ous prob­lems of their own, includ­ing their grim­ly com­ic same­ness. The film begins with an ani­mat­ed his­to­ry les­son on Sovi­et urban plan­ning. “The urban design was not flex­i­ble,” author Philipp Meuser tells Byrnes. “This was the first cri­tique of them dat­ing back to the ear­ly ‘60s.” Lat­er ver­sions built under Brezh­nev and called “Brezh­nevkis” intro­duced dif­fer­ent shapes and sizes to break up the monot­o­ny. All of the hous­ing blocks were built to last 20 to 25 years and were not well-main­tained, if they were main­tained at all. The ear­li­est began dete­ri­o­rat­ing in the ‘70s.

At their height, how­ev­er, Krush­choyvkas “were pop­u­lar because it was rev­o­lu­tion­ary for hous­ing pol­i­tics.” One U.S. offi­cial put it in 1967: “What the Rus­sians have done is to devel­op the only tech­nol­o­gy in the world to pro­duce accept­able, low-cost hous­ing on a large scale.” Cities around the world fol­lowed suit in build­ings like the Japan­ese danchi, for exam­ple, and the infa­mous­ly awful Amer­i­can pub­lic hous­ing projects of the 60s and 70s, built along sim­i­lar lines as the Krushchy­ovkas and the mis­guid­ed urban design the­o­ries of Swiss archi­tect Le Cor­busier, anoth­er mod­ernist who, like the Con­struc­tivists, reimag­ined city space accord­ing to a mod­el of mass pro­duc­tion.

The orig­i­nal Con­struc­tivist man­i­festo, pub­lished in 1923, promised art and build­ing “of no dis­cernible ‘style’ but sim­ply a prod­uct of an indus­tri­al order like a car, an aero­plane and such like.” The real­i­ty of Con­struc­tivist designs — like the designs of cars and aero­planes — involved a great deal of imag­i­na­tion and cre­ativ­i­ty. But the archi­tec­tur­al lega­cy of what Con­struc­tivists tout­ed as “tech­ni­cal mas­tery and orga­ni­za­tion of mate­ri­als” — under the mas­sive­ly cen­tral­ized bureau­cra­cy of the ful­ly real­ized one-par­ty Com­mu­nist state — cre­at­ed some­thing entire­ly dif­fer­ent than the ide­al­is­tic avant-gardists had once intend­ed for the mod­ern city.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Every­thing You Need to Know About Mod­ern Russ­ian Art in 25 Min­utes: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Futur­ism, Social­ist Real­ism & More

When Sovi­et Artists Turned Tex­tiles (Scarves, Table­cloths & Cur­tains) into Beau­ti­ful Pro­pa­gan­da in the 1920s & 1930s

The Glo­ri­ous Poster Art of the Sovi­et Space Pro­gram in Its Gold­en Age (1958–1963)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Accord­ing to myth, the first Japan­ese poet, Susano‑o, the storm god, named the activ­i­ty of build­ing as equal to the works of nature. Trav­el blog Kan­sai Odyssey writes, “Susano‑o felt rather inspired” while at Suga Shrine in Shi­mane Pre­fec­ture, “and recit­ed the first poem in Japan­ese lit­er­a­ture.” Rough­ly trans­lat­ed, it reads: “In Izu­mo, where the clouds form, / I see a fence of clouds. / To pro­tect my wife, I too, built a fence. / These clouds are as my fence.”

An embrace of the nat­ur­al world inter­min­gles in Japan­ese cul­ture with a craft tra­di­tion renowned the world over, not least in the build­ing arts. “Since the 12th Cen­tu­ry,” Grace Ebert writes at Colos­sal, “Japan­ese arti­sans have been employ­ing a con­struc­tion tech­nique that uses just one sim­ple mate­r­i­al: wood. Rather than uti­lize glue, nails, and oth­er fas­ten­ers, the tra­di­tion of Japan­ese wood join­ery notch­es slabs of tim­ber so that the grooves lock togeth­er and form a stur­dy struc­ture.”

Although most­ly prac­ticed in the repair and preser­va­tion of his­toric build­ings these days, Japan­ese join­ery still inspires mod­ern wood­work­ers, engi­neers, and archi­tects for its incred­i­ble pre­ci­sion and endurance. Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese build­ings are “struc­tures built from nat­ur­al mate­ri­als and the knowl­edge and skills passed down gen­er­a­tions,” writes Yamanashi-based car­pen­ter Dylan Iwaku­ni. “Through the fine skills and knowl­edge, Japan­ese Wood­en Archi­tec­ture has been stand­ing for (thou­sands of) years.”

In the video at the top, you can see Iwaku­ni and his team’s excite­ment as they dis­cov­er tra­di­tion­al join­ery while dis­as­sem­bling a 100-year-old Japan­ese house. The video shows each joint in close-up, adding a title that names its par­tic­u­lar type. “As it became a tra­di­tion in Japan,” wrote Col­in Mar­shall in a pre­vi­ous post on Iwakuni’s craft, “this car­pen­try devel­oped a canon of join­ing meth­ods.” All of the joints, from the very sim­ple to the mind-bog­gling­ly puz­zle-like, were of course cut by hand. No pow­er tools in medieval Japan.

Just above, see Iwaku­ni intro­duce the art of join­ery, and see sev­er­al more of his demon­stra­tions here. Those inter­est­ed in going fur­ther should see our pre­vi­ous posts at the links below. Find even more hands-on resources at the Japan Wood­craft Asso­ci­a­tion.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery: A Kyoto Wood­work­er Shows How Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Cre­at­ed Wood Struc­tures With­out Nails or Glue

Free Soft­ware Lets You Cre­ate Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Joints & Fur­ni­ture: Down­load Tsug­ite

See How Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Can Build a Whole Build­ing Using No Nails or Screws

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness