Triumphantly Unusual Images of the Eiffel Tower

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 732  Blog Bookstore

This image of the building of the foundation of the Eiffel Tower, which appeared in the Scientific American in 1888, appears both orderly and chaotic, a dizzy miasma of activity and a confusion of right angles.  (My six-year-old Tess says that it looks “worky”.)  Part of the issue is the fine quality of the jumble, with 90-degree angles everywhere, which confuses the eye.  Another part is the perspective, which is odd in places, and which takes the whole of it and makes the print into a near Escher-like experience of impossibility.  IT is this spatial confusion which makes this print so uncomfortable to me. For instance it seems that the observer’s point of view may be in several different positions, depending

on where you resolve to fix our eye: if you choose the worker’s shed in the upper left corner as a reference point, the height of you viewpoint will be different than if you used, say the first pointing man in the foreground as reference.  Also that pointing man sands next to a little rail track that seems to hoist itself into the air before disappearing.  There’s much else, but these examples will do for present.

These other images are the first nail & Eiffel Tower images I've ever seen.  The explanation is simple enough, though I think I'd much rather not know. 

This image and data is from the generally useful data and interesting if not useless info Scientific American Reference Book. A Manual for the Office, Household and Shop, by Albert A. Hopkins, and published in 1903. It gloriously depicts the annual American finish nail production in terms of Eiffel Towers:  there were evidently 10-million 100-pound kegs of these nails made in 1902; if they were made into one big nail, it would be this one--52' in diameter and 1000 feet tall.  I guess another useful visual bit would be the representation of the number of new houses built/kegs of nails, which would make this image a little more meaningful; though, perhaps, we may not be going for meaning, here, necessarily.

 

 

Comments

[Ray Girvan]

Escher-like

Or Piranesi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Piranesi9c.jpg

There's very interesting background in Joseph Harriss' "The Tallest Tower", with plenty of preview at Google Books ( http://tinyurl.com/mhbnt5 )

[woid]

That nail next to the Eiffel Tower... Claes Oldenburg, right?

[John Ptak]

Ray: yes ob both counts, I can see both artists in there a little. The confusion of the jumble reminds me of the fineness and ordered chaos of Escher; and the general darkness and forboding of Piranesi.