The Eiffel Tower was built to be taken down. Raised as the entrance arch for the 1889 World's Fair, Gustave Eiffel's iron lattice held its permit for only twenty years, and much of artistic Paris signed a furious letter against it. What saved it was usefulness: engineers bolted antennas to its crown for radio and telegraphy, and a structure that could transmit was worth keeping. Assembled from some eighteen thousand iron pieces and millions of rivets, it stood as the tallest thing on Earth for four decades, until New York's skyscrapers overtook it.
Stand beneath the four splayed feet and its familiar outline dissolves; you look up into a cage of iron that seems to hold no solid surface at all, only air and lace. Lifts climb at an angle through the legs to three levels, the highest a narrow perch where the city flattens into grey roofs and green ribbons of park. Today it is the most visited paid monument in the world, hand-painted in a warm brown that shifts from base to tip. After dark, for a few minutes on the hour, thousands of bulbs flicker across it.