David Serero wants you to know, first of all, that it was not a hoax. It was not, as many claim, a publicity stunt. And it was certainly not an April Fool’s joke. “We do have this tradition also,” the Paris-based architect told me in an email. “But our project was released three weeks before. Isn’t that a little early?”
For those three weeks, whatever it was unfurled through the design world like gigantic Kevlar petals rippling open atop one of the most iconic structures on the planet. By late March it was common knowledge that Serero Architects’ winning idea had claimed victory in an open competition to temporarily remodel the public reception and access areas for the 120th anniversary of the Eiffel Tower.
On March 24, the Guardian synthesized the information from all the blogs and took it it one step further, reporting that Eiffel Tower officials had issued a statement confirming that the design had indeed won its competition. But two days later the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel actually did issue a statement–this is translated from French–”[We] did not launch any invitation concerning the installation of the top of the monument and the Parisian cabinet of architects quoted never stood as a candidate to any consultation launched by the company.”
In three short weeks we went from from gawking at our monitors in disbelief, to raising flutes of Champagne on a temporarily-bolted 580-square-meter viewing platform, to gawking at our monitors in disbelief again.
- Tags: Construction, Design, Light, Paris, Project
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