Kondakova's Eiffel Tower

Last weekend I decided to do some shopping at Galleria Dallas. Walking by the Martin Lawrence Galleries, I noticed a painting in the window that made me stop and admire its beauty -- The Heart of Paris, by Liudmila Kondakova.

How does she describe her relationship with Paris?

"I want to show that Paris belongs to everyone who loves it, to the people who live there, as well as those who only see it in their dreams. My Paris is an ideal world, an ideal reality."

-- Liudmila Kondakova

Even though I've never visited Paris, her painting did make me think of Paris and wonder how amazing it would be to visit the city of lights.

When I returned home that Sunday afternoon, I planned to watch a football game but found a PBS documentary about the building of the Eiffel Tower. Funny how things come together sometimes to make us fascinate about a topic or event or structure. Well, the documentary had many riveting points, although I was particularly interested in one phase of the construction. The most critical moment came when the four arched legs of the tower were completed and the first platform was to be placed on top -- the arches had to be perfectly level. Gustave Eiffel -- the designer of the tower -- had a solution. He built two options into the design of the arched towers to assure the arches would be perfectly even with each other:

1. A hydraulic system was under each arch. If an arch was too low, the hydraulics could raise the towering arch to meet the other towers.
2. The arches rested on a layer of sand. If an arch was too high, sand could be pump right through the arch and lower it to the needed level.

The flexibility to assure the towers were dead even with each other was imperative, for the rest of the Eiffel tower would climb the sky from the first platform. And if the first platform did not sit even, delays, if not disastrous consequences would follow for Eiffel's tower.

So we see that the great designers of the industrial revolution knew how to avoid frustration and failure by building options into their projects from the ground up.

tags: Product Management

Comments

[Geotrotter]

Here is some other Eiffel tower seen on Google Earth.

[Lefteris Heretakis]

Very interesting collection of high quality articles.