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Old 07-02-2018, 02:22 PM
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nando nando is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Turin (Italy)
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Remko277 You did a wonderful work with all those endless cuts.
I always admired la Tour Eiffel as an engineering masterpiece, and all times i visited it I was impressed by its lightness.
Me too I put it in my endless list of to do models, but i was intimidated by the amount of cuts you have to do for to render the openwork that

distinguishes this building.

About that, in my research i found a long article that better than me explains the concepts and you can read some relevant excerpts here below. There is also an interesting remark that refer to a paper version of the tower. I verified those notes and they are correct.

You can verify by yourself considering those numbers:
height 312,27 mt or 31227 cm
weight 7.300 metric tons or 7.300.000.000 gr

For the paper version (1/1000) you have a height of (near) 31 cm and a weight of 6,47 gm.Voilà

Now the excerpts.

"The aerial theme, however, develops in a completely different direction and meets unpublished symbols on its path, unrelated to the theme of altitude. The first attribute of the substance aerial is lightness. And the tower is a symbol of lightness. One of Eiffel's technical prowess was notoriously to associate the gigantism (however slender) of the form to the lightness of the material; a tower reduced by a thousand times would weigh only seven grams, like a sheet of writing paper.
....
The second attribute of the air substance is a very particular quality of the surface, which is usually found in certain fabrics, the openwork.
...
The openwork is a precious attribute of the substance, it attenuates it without destroying it; in short, it shows the emptiness and manifests
nothingness without however eliminate its privative state; you always see the sky through the tower.
...

Roland Barthes La Tour Eiffel, 1964"

My compliments and I'll follow your thread.
Best, Nando

PS: remember that if you want compare the ratio between a linear dimension and weight you have to transform linear in cubic.

PS: PS: @InstantDurable there is a model that would like to render the emptiness of the openwork by the mean of transparent sheets.
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