Framing the Eiffel Tower: From postcards to Postmodernism (original) (raw)
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Framing the Eiffel Tower: From postcards to Postmodernism by Sonya Stephens
The visual impact, and iconic status, of the Eiffel Tower have long been established. Indeed, it was conceived as both a monumental sight and as a place for viewing, and so its place in visual culture, it might be argued, was a very part of the Tower's conception in 1884, long before a committee had even been formed to select a centerpiece for the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Recent innovations in a range of fields, including cultural geography and visual culture, have led scholars to reflect on what constitutes an urban icon, to question that which is precisely the 'visual' in urban culture, and to propose that 'the Eiffel Tower is actually the original and defining urban icon'.
Between Barthes's myth and Benjamin's commodity: images of the Eiffel Tower
2018
I examine how two pivotal writers of the 20th century, Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin, attached a catalogue of meanings to the Eiffel Tower. The Parisian monument marked a critical point in artistic production – a fusion of architectural thought and innovatory engineering. Looking at the claims made about the Tower by Barthes and Benjamin, I will attempt to show how their discussion fits into a broader framework of thinkers’ inquiries. For Barthes, the tower epitomises his semiotic exploration of the nature of the myth. In turn, Benjamin translates the monument into a testing ground for shifts occurring in the culture of spectatorship and image production at the end of the nineteenth century. My analysis will try to examine how successful those two respective takes on the Eiffel Tower are in terms of proving their validity; where do they find a common ground and where do they stand in opposition to one another.
In: Michael Juul Holm & Mette Marie Kallehauge (Eds), Africa Architecture Culture Identity. Pp. 84-88., 2015
The ‘tower’ project proposes a reflection, in the form of a visual essay, on the legacy of colonial modernist architecture in Kinshasa, the social afterlives of colonialist infrastructure, and different historical and contemporary utopian visions of the city. Through its architecture, colonial modernity introduced the notion of the vertical in the emerging urban landscape of the 1940s and 1950s. One of the early landmarks of Belgian colonial urban architecture was the Forescom tower. Built in 1946, it was Leopoldville’s first skyscraper, and one of the first high rise buildings of Central Africa. Pointing towards the sky, it also pointed to the future. It embodied and made tangible new ideas of possible futures, and as such the tower materially translated and emblematically visualised colonialist ideologies of progress and modernity (while simultaneously also embodying the darker repressive side of colonialism, with its elaborate technologies of domination, control and surveillance. The tower therefore also forcefully reminds us of the fact that the urban landscape largely came about as the result of a very intrusive history of (physical and symbolical) violence, marked by racial segregation, as well as by violent processes of dispossession and relocation). Today, however, rather than referring to the ideal of the vertical, Kinshasa’s inhabitants often seem to resort to the concept of ‘hole’ to describe the urban infrastructure in which they live. On a first level the notion of the hole (libulu in Lingala) refers to the physical holes and gaps that mark the urban surface (potholes in the road, the many erosion sites that characterize Kinshasa’s landscape), but libulu also refers to the site of the prison, for example, and more generally it has become a meta-concept to reflect both upon the material degradation of the colonial infrastructure, and upon the closures and the often dismal quality of the social life that puctuates the material ruination of the colonial city. How is the gap between colonial tower and postcolonial hole filled in the experience of Congolese urban residents? How liveable is the legacy of colonialist modernity in the contemporary urban setting? What are the social afterlives of the colonial infrastructural heritage, and what dreams and visions of possible futures, if any, does that colonial legacy still trigger for the residents of Kinshasa today? And how are these older visions replayed and reformulated in the age of a global neoliberal capitalism that has (once again) turned the city into a huge building site? Focusing on a number of specific historical and contemporary built sites in Kinshasa, the photos and video-installation reflect upon colonial modernity’s promises, its visions of possible futurities, and the way in which these visions continue to inspire (or not) urban life in Central Africa today. We do not only comment upon the degradation of colonial infrastructures but also explore the ways in which the city continues to reformulate these earlier propositions and to read new openings, possibilities and alternative utopian visions into the very ruination of its material fabric. The ongoing transformation of towers into holes, and holes into towers, is also what the proposed video installation illustrates. This video offers a guided tour by ‘Docteur’, the owner of a remarkable building that is situated in the municipality of Limete. Conceived and realized by ‘Docteur’ without the help of any professional architects, the construction of this as yet unfinished tower was started in 2003. In many ways, this postcolonial tower forms a contrapuntal comment on the 1946 Forescom building and everything it exemplified at the time, while also illustrating the various ways in which the colonialist legacy continues to be reformulated and reassembled today.
The Eiffel Tower as Poetical Chronotope of the Historical Avant-garde
NeMLA Annual Meeting. Toronto, Ontario, May 1, 2015
These events and receptions are available to conference registrants for free. In addition, members can enroll, for a small fee, in a number of exciting and interactive small-group workshops related to teaching in the humanities, pedagogy and professionalization, and creative writing. We will conclude the convention with our usual membership brunch and the call for proposals for NeMLA 2016.
The article examines a group of exhibitions that took place in the late seventies and early eighties and are useful for grasping what was at stake regarding the debates on the tensions between modernist and post-modernist architecture. Among the exhibitions that are examined are Europa-America: Architettura urbana, alternative suburbane, curated by Vittorio Gregotti for the Biennale di Venezia in 1976; La Presenza del passato, curated by Paolo Portoghesi for the Biennale di Venezia in 1980; the French version of La presenza del passato-Présence de l'histoire, l'après modernisme-held in the framework of the Festival d'Automne de Paris in 1981; Architectures en France: Modernité /post-modernité , curated by Chantal Béret and held at the Institut Français d'Architecture (18 November 1981-6 February 1982); La modernité , un projet inachevé : 40 architectures, curated by Paul Chemetov and Jean-Claude Garcias for the Festival d'Automne de Paris in 1982; La modernité ou l'esprit du temps, curated by Jean Nouvel, Patrice Goulet, and Francois Barré and held at the Centre Pompidou in 1982; and Nouveaux plaisirs d'architecture, curated by Jean Dethier for the Centre Pompidou in 1985, among other exhibitions. Analysing certain important texts published in the catalogues of the afore-mentioned exhibitions, the debates that accompanied the exhibitions and an ensemble of articles in French architectural magazines such as L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui and the Techniques & Architecture , the article aims to present the questions that were at the centre of the debates regarding the opposition or osmosis between the modernist and postmodernist ideals. Some figures, such as Jean Nouvel, were more in favour of the cross-fertilisation between modernity and postmodernity, while others, such as Paul Chemetov, believed that architects should rediscover modernity in order to enhance the civic dimension of architecture. Following Pierre Bourdieu's approach, the article argues that the tension between the ways in which each of these exhibitions treats the role of the image within architectural design and the role of architecture for the construction of a vision regarding progress is the expression of two divergent positions in social space.
Golden Years? How Postmodernity changed the Theoretical Discourse on Architecture and the City
(with Riklef Rambow) in: Identifications of the Postmodern. Representations and Discourses (= Wolkenkuckucksheim / Cloud-Chuckoo-Land, No. 42), 2022
Editorial of "Identifications of the Postmodern. Repersentations and Discourses", No. 44 of the journal Cloud-Chuckoo-Land. The phenomenon of postmodernism in architecture cannot be reduced to questions of style. For several decades, theoretical discourses played a crucial role in architectural production. Issue 42 presents the second part of our examination of so-called postmodernism. While the previous issue dealt with changing perspectives on the city, form and questions of architectural identity and their retrospective classification, the contributions of the present issue focus on questions of representation and discourse. The thinking referred to as postmodern has produced a plethora of new forms of engagement with and representation of architecture and urbanism that continue to resonate today. New forms of discourse and techniques of representation also gave rise to new role models, self-understandings and institutions. Would it be an exaggeration to speak of the "golden years" of theory? In the long run, has postmodernism led to a popularisation or a loss of relevance of architecture? Or even, paradoxically, to both? We thank Guia Baratelli, Sabine Brinitzer, Giovanni Carli, Frida Grahn, Samuel Korn, Kasper Lægring, Kenta Matsui, Giacomo Pala and Alexandru Sabău.
Eiffel Tower Through The Eyes of Painters
The Eiffel Tower, the global icon of France, was erected as the entrance to the Paris International Exposition in 1889. It was a suitable centrepiece for the World Fair, which celebrated the centennial of the French Revolution. Although the tower was a subject of controversy at the time of its construction, many European painters have been inspired by the majestic figure of the Eiffel Tower. They picturised the tower in their portraits and cityscapes. Paul Louis Delance, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and Henri Rousseau were the first artists to depict this symbol of modernity. Robert Delaunay and Marc Chagall used the image of the tower most frequently. Maurice Utrillo, Raoul Dufy, Fernand Léger, Diego Rivera, Max Beckmann and Christian Schad can also be counted among the artists who picturised the tower. The Eiffel Tower appears differently in the eyes of pointillist, expressionist, orfist, cubist and abstract painters. Keywords: Eiffel Tower, European art, painting.