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By Béatrice Cassignol
Every year, over 30 million people visit the Eiffel Tower in Paris and seven million visitors climb the monument. It is one of the most iconic landmarks in the world, and we are incredibly excited to announce our collaboration with the City of Paris in its quest to redevelop the area surrounding the Eiffel Tower.
At present, the layout of the site which covers the Trocadéro Gardens, Champ de Mars as well as the esplanade is not in keeping with the grandeur of the Eiffel Tower and isn’t always the most welcoming environment for visitors.
In order to reimagine this site and create a sense of movement between the different areas, the City of Paris launched a competitive tender process earlier this year called “The Eiffel Tower Site: discover – approach – visit.”
The competition was open to architects and engineers from around the world, with the aim of helping the Paris City Council to promote a resilient, inclusive, environmentally conscious city, while helping to develop tourism and address accessibility concerns ahead of the Summer Games in 2024. The challenge facing designers will be to find a robust way of dealing with the many multifaceted demands imposed on by the site by its many visitors.
As part of the partnership, Autodesk will create a digital 3D model of the existing Eiffel Tower grand site and will support the selected teams with the development and visualisation of their designs.
The 3D model will enable the City of Paris and the project management teams to design, visualize, simulate and collaborate more effectively throughout the competitive process. It will also allow the jury and the City of Paris to visualize, evaluate and understand the projects submitted by the candidate teams in 3D, and to analyse them more easily throughout the entire workflow from design to construction.
Thus, the use of BIM (Building Information Modeling) has been made mandatory for the teams who would like to compete.
With this visionary approach, the City of Paris is embracing advanced technology to not only improve the redesign and construction of the surrounding areas, but also for deploying technology to encourage greater public participation.
With this project, the City of Paris aims to make this public area more enjoyable and accessible to all, to offer more services throughout their journey, but also to offer a cultural experience to rediscover the site’s rich history and heritage. This will involve improving the quality of pedestrian paths from public transportation, as well as orientation and timing information.
The experience of the visitors will be at the heart of the project, as well as urban and landscape treatment, in the spirit of the Paris Pedestrian Plan and the Paris 2022 Tourism Strategy and guided by the future Paris Climate Air Energy Plan.
“This is a new way of making the City – with these 3D technologies, we will be able to visualize the project management teams’ development proposals. BIM will improve the projects thanks to a better view of their integration in the site. Parisians will be able to better understand and evaluate the different projects”, says Jean-Louis Missika, Deputy Mayor of Paris, in charge of urban planning, architecture, Grand Paris projects, economic development and attractiveness.
“If the design of the Eiffel Tower is known throughout the world, its visitors’ experience as a whole is more complex to grasp. The model created by Autodesk will allow us to take into account this essential aspect of the competitive dialogue, and to optimally judge the candidate teams’ proposal”, says Jean-François Martins, Deputy Mayor of Paris, in charge of all questions relating to sport, tourism, Olympic and Paralympic Games.
“Embedding a digital 3D model and mandating the use of BIM, in a competition of this leve,l strengthens the creative process by allowing architects and engineers to quickly simulate different design hypotheses and visually verify their coherence,” said Nicolas Mangon, Senior Vice President AEC Strategy and Business Marketing at Autodesk. “BIM will also help to promote dialogue within the teams ensuring the best possible proposal which meets the ambitions of the City of Paris. The adoption of BIM is expanding in France, and for it to be used to redesign one of the world’s most iconic monuments will demonstrate the power and benefits of this approach on a global scale.”
For more information on this project, please visit https://www.paris.fr/actualites/un-appel-a-projets-pour-reamenager-la-tour-eiffel-5397
