That's it. That's the whole thing. Built as a temporary structure, intended to be torn down after twenty years. At its core, a very tall lamp post.
And arguably the most beloved object on earth.
I've drunk wine under it when Leith wasn't my wife yet. I've taken my daughter to the top and watched her face do that thing faces do when the world suddenly gets bigger. I've played cricket beneath it for my son's 18th birthday, ridiculous, but that's us. And I've shared a beer with my people in a plastic igloo they bolt to the middle level in winter, which is both weird and very cool.
Same lamp post. Four completely different stories.
Proposals and paintings and films and first trips and bucket lists and terrible tourist photos and one surprisingly competitive game of cricket. The Eiffel Tower didn't need better engineering. It just needed time, and people to keep turning up with their lives and laying them down at its feet. Three hundred and thirty metres of iron that serves no practical purpose, and yet, would anyone actually care about Paris without it?
Every brief we get is essentially the same question underneath it. How do we make people feel something real about this thing? Not manufacture a feeling. Find the real one and get out of its way. Most of our clients don't have a hundred and thirty years. So we have to move faster.
The lamp post didn't need a better lamp. It needed Gustave Eiffel to have the good sense to build it somewhere people were already going to fall in love.