In 1890, the year after the Eiffel Tower opened as the centerpiece of the Paris Exposition Universelle, writer Henri Girard declared, in a small volume dedicated to La Tour Eiffel de Trois Cent Métres, that its designer, Gustave Eiffel, had become “the object of general envy” amongst the denizens of Paris [Fig.1].[3] This envy, according to Girard, was inspired not by the fame that had accrued upon its designer, or the fortune the tower generated but, rather, from a single design feature he had built into the plan. Eiffel had installed a private apartment at the summit of his colossal tower to which he alone had access.

Unlike the rest of the tower, the apartment was not notable for its iterations of wrought iron modernity and technological prowess. Rather, it was “furnished in the simple style dear to scientists,” according to Girard, and replete with the wooden cabinets and tables, velvet settees, and flocked wallpaper worthy of any good bourgeois.[4] Yet, despite its commonplace appearance, “[c]ountless numbers of people,” Girard wrote, “have wanted to share the eyrie of the eminent engineer. He has received innumerable letters offering him a small fortune to rent his “pied à terre” by the night,” he continued, yet all had been refused.[5] What was the appeal of this refuge perched atop the tower? Girard mused upon the joys such a dwelling might offer a man like Eiffel, “far from the noises and from human suffering.” “In the daytime,” he wrote, “he can look out on the splendors of Paris…At night, in the clouds, soothed by the singing wind, he falls asleep by the light of the eternally watchful stars. Is there anyone who can describe to us the dreams that he has in his heavenly residence?”[6]

It is tempting to situate this pied à terre in the realm of the domestic. Viewed from this perspective, one can understand the Eiffel apartment as an iteration of domesticity antithetical to the normative space of his other residences: an estate in the French countryside and a massive stone hôtel particulier on the Rue Rabelais in Paris replete with French historicist furniture, chandeliers, objets d’art, paintings, and other signifiers of upper-class domesticity in the late nineteenth century.

But the installation of such an abode, buffeted by constant wind and cold almost 1,000 feet from the ground, clearly exceeded the bounds of banal, earthbound domesticity and bourgeois respectability. Indeed, such a framework for interpretation is excessively reductive, as the tower apartment so thoroughly foils all notions of traditional domesticity that it clearly defies categorization as such. It was a private space embedded within the very body of a public, purpose-built spectacle. It was an interior on a structure that, with its open lattice-work frame and exposed staircases, was defined almost entirely by its exteriority and transparency. It represented height firmly anchored to the ground. It was, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s poetic description of the Paris arcades, like other enigmatic “dream” structures of the nineteenth century, “both house and stars.”[7]

The Eiffel Tower was at the epicenter of a constellation of dreams: of technological progress, modernity, and national prestige. Indeed the metaphor of the dream might provide a more appropriate approach to interpreting such an irrational space. What dreams, motivations and aspirations inspired Eiffel to build his tower-top apartment in the first place? And, drawing inspiration from Benjamin’s assertion that “not architecture alone, but all technology, is at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream,” we can inquire as to what the top of the tower can tell us about the collective dreams of the culture more broadly.[8]

Considering such questions is the project of this essay. I argue that it was the twinned dreams of exploration and mastery of the wind which held Eiffel in their thrall and that these dreams were perfectly encapsulated in the idea of flight. The small apartment with its peculiar fairground address and its adjacent tower laboratories can be read as potent iteration of his aeronautic and exploratory ambitions. These ambitions, moreover, were shared by French society more broadly. Seen through this lens, the tower reveals itself as both theater of experiment and experimental object collapsed into one, with conditions of flight a central object of investigation. Like a spectacular airship for one permanently perched in the sky, the top of the tower seemed poised for an exploratory adventure like the “space bullet” aimed at the moon in a Jules Verne adventure. But at the same time, it was also a living laboratory, a theater of experiment in a network of experimental sites for Eiffel’s many investigations of the wind. An examination of this space permits us to understand how experimentation and exploration, scientific work and spectacle, were entangled in the late nineteenth-century popular imagination.

I. Simulation: Voyage

“In the fuselage of any kind of aircraft, or in the capsule of a space vehicle: the space occupied by a pilot, observer, astronaut, or (formerly) a passenger.”

--Oxford English Dictionary (2013), s.v. “cockpit”

“In the style characteristic of the Second Empire, the apartment becomes a sort of cockpit.”

--Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth-Century [9]

Of all the dreams which may have held the universe of fin-de-siècle society in its intoxicating grasp, the complex, eclectic, and characteristically modern desire to be somewhere other than ‘here’ may have been among the most dominant. Historians of the nineteenth-century have noted that such desires fueled much of the passion for exoticism and historicism evident in both the visual arts and popular culture of the era.[10] In looking at the historicist and orientalist-themed rooms in the home of French travel writer Pierre Loti, for example, historian Stephen Bann discerns an urge, characteristic of the era, to translate places once visited or historical epochs once dreamed of into real spaces for the purposes of fantasized escape. Behind this, Bann sees potent evidence of a phenomenon which drives all representative acts: “the need to exteriorize in a particular medium images and fantasies to which the subject declares a relationship of desire or lack.”[11]

Might not the prospect of the exploration of foreign lands and, moreover, the mechanisms of modern travel which permitted such exploration also fit into this schema, articulating this modern desire to be somewhere other than here? That the taste for such adventure permeated the culture is evident in, for example, the popularity of travel literature, the diversions offered by panoramas depicting exotic lands, or the science-fiction fantasies of Jules Verne. The explosion of new travel technologies over the course of the nineteenth century—the steam locomotive, steamer ship, and air balloon among others—also fueled these fantasies. Could Eiffel’s tower have participated in giving expression, in some fragmentary, subconscious way, to these cultural proclivities?