Towering ideals

Last fall, students at the Rice School of Architecture Paris took on the assignment of designing housing for 2,500 Olympic athletes as additions to the Eiffel Tower. Clockwise from top left, the renderings are by Austin Jarvis and Pyline Tangsuvanich; Eric Burnside and Wenqi Chen; Mengxia Qi and Chongliang Tao; Adelina Koleva and Hannah Huff and Hongyi Jin and Shen Lu.   

Rice School of Architecture Paris students imagine Olympic housing at Eiffel Tower 

Here’s a challenge: Enhance the Eiffel Tower to add living space for Olympic athletes. Thousands of them.

And don’t let your work touch the ground.

Students studying at the Rice School of Architecture Paris (RSAP), the university’s only remote campus, accepted that challenge last semester and created head-turning ideas that would temporarily transform the iconic structure to serve the city’s hoped-for 2024 Summer Olympics.

The five two-member teams created plans to add apartments and other facilities to the tower’s inside, outside or both. One would wrap a walking path around the outside of the tower with apartments along the way. Another would stuff housing into the empty space between the arches, with an extension of the Seine River providing boat transportation for the athletes to competition sites. A third puts a scaffold-like tower all the way around and well above Eiffel. In others, athletes would occupy apartments that flow down one side of the icon or a pyramid-like structure suspended inside.

“For me, there was a barrier to entry, just getting over the idea that you’re building on this untouchable icon,” said Pyline Tangsuvanich, a fifth-year student. “But as the semester went on, we began to see it as a large piece of infrastructure ripe with potential.”

Student models of their Eiffel Tower designs.

The RSAP project was one of the architecture school’s Totalization Studios, in which students are required to tackle an initiative from front to back, with models, renderings and complete, structurally sound plans.

“Totalization is the school’s unique way of responding to our accreditation requirement for a comprehensive studio where all building and construction systems are integrated into a cohesive design proposal,” said John Casbarian, RSAP founding director and the Harry K. and Albert K. Smith Professor of Architecture. “Our students have to demonstrate, through research and applied knowledge, that no matter how ambitious their ideas, they have the proficiency to innovatively address, simultaneously, all aspects of the design, including technical details and construction methodologies.”

No pressure there. “It was a lot of ambition packaged into a really short amount of time,” said Adelina Koleva, a fifth-year student. “That’s what I found challenging.”

Hannah Huff, left, and Adeline Koleva present their concept to the RSAP jury.

Architects Linna Choi and Tarik Oualalou, both instructors at RSAP, came up with the idea. Their assignment called for a 60,000-square-meter structure that would house about a fifth of the typical Olympic village. They expected to present the ideas to the city as part of its call for public participation in the bid process.

“We try to make the projects manageable, but in Paris we also like to make use of why we’re here and the rich urban context,” Oualalou said.

The 126-year-old tower’s status as a symbol of Paris made it fair game, he said, especially with the city bidding for such a high-profile event. “Paris is using its bid as part of a greater vision of reorganizing the relationship between the city and the suburbs,” Oualalou said. “With the notion that we have to be careful not to be wasteful, we proposed that students think about reusing something that’s already there.

“The second idea was to challenge the relationship with an existing icon that everybody ‘sees’ but doesn’t ever really see.”

“I don’t think Parisians understand it the way that foreigners or people outside of Paris do,” said fifth-year student Hannah Huff. “It’s more precious as a global treasure rather than something the Parisians think about every day.”

Despite that, it didn’t escape the students’ notice that after the attacks on Paris last November, during their time in the city, Parisians latched onto a peace symbol with the Eiffel Tower at its center.

Faculty and students at the Rice School of Architecture Paris in fall, 2015. From left: faculty members John Casbarian and Tarik Oualalou, student Hongyi Jin, faculty member Linna Choi and assistant director Garry White, students Wenqi Chen, Chongliang Tao, Hannah Huff, Shen Lu, Eric Burnside and Pyline Tangsuvanich, faculty member Jim Njoo, student Adelina Koleva, faculty member Françoise Fromonot, student Austin Jarvis and Maxim Laroussi, visiting from the University of Limerick, Ireland.

Casbarian, who co-taught the studio with Choi and Oualalou, said the Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 World’s Fair, is “incredibly interesting” because it was intended to be dismantled after 20 years. “Much of what we see is not necessary structurally,” he said. “There’s a lot of decoration. So part of the challenge of the studio was to understand how to attach to the structure as well as, in keeping with the original premise, how to dismantle the addition when the use is over.”

Oualalou described the idea that the students’ designs had to be totally supported by the tower as “a bit geeky, but fascinating. … It has to grow out of the existing structure.”

The students got advice from leading structural consultants who confirmed the tower could support the added weight. “It looks fragile but it’s engineered to be much stronger,” said Eric Burnside, who with partner and fellow graduate student Wenqi Chen designed the tower-on-a-tower. “The actual material weight is nowhere near its capacity for what it can hold.”

The team envisioned a modular and perhaps even reusable structure that soared 100 meters above the top of the Eiffel. “What we did suggested the relationship between famous and historical architecture and scaffolding,” Chen said.

“When you visit European countries, you might be lucky or unlucky – depending on how you feel about scaffolding – and the monument you go to see could be covered and under repair,” Burnside said. “We thought of our project like the Capitol in Washington D.C., where they’re redoing the dome. It’s covered in scaffolding, but the way it’s lit at night is a beautiful thing.

“Our project obscures it, but a big part is a kind of flickering image of the tower. When the tower lights up, you’ll see this glowing artifact inside our building,” he said.

Huff admitted that the path around the tower she designed with Koleva was inspired by her love of running. “We connected it to an outdoor running and activity path that I ran every day,” she said. “I absolutely would run all the way up on the park level.

“Honestly, it was one of the most difficult projects I’ve done in architecture school, but I learned a lot,” she said. “And it will be a good discussion point anytime I show someone my portfolio.”

Student drawings, clockwise from top left, by Mengxia Qi/Chongliang Tao; Austin Jarvis/Pyline Tangsuvanich; Eric Burnside/Wenqi Chen; Adelina Koleva/Hannah Huff and Hongyi Jin/Shen Lu.