Eiffel

The Eiffel Tower stands as a skeletal iron spire reaching over one thousand feet into the sky, composed of eighteen thousand individual metal parts held together by two and a half million rivets. Gustave Eiffel designed it for the eighteen eighty-nine World’s Fair to mark the centennial of the French Revolution. When construction began, local artists and writers signed a protest calling it a hollow, ridiculous tower that would dishonor Paris. It remained the tallest structure in the world for four decades.