Reflections on the Eiffel Tower and a few other, more modest structures: Bernard Vaudeville’s inaugural lecture for first-year students

The Eiffel Tower first existed in the form of diagrams, drawings, calculations, specifications and cost estimates. This is the nature of any project: to develop a coherent system that is as well-controlled as possible. This phase of the project usually keeps engineers busiest and motivates them the most. Then the tower took shape during an extraordinary construction project, leaving behind the controlled world of the design phase and coming face to face with reality – a reality that was chaotic, rough, uncertain and more complex than anticipated.

One hundred and thirty-seven years later, the Eiffel Tower is still standing, though partially remodelled, worn in places, regularly adorned and weighed down by flags, sculptures and, most recently, the Olympic rings. Today, any work carried out on the tower involves an approach that differs radically from the design process. It is no longer the well-ordered system that matters, but its complex and ever-changing reality.

“Reflections on the Eiffel Tower and a few other more modest structures”: it is on this point of fiction—between design and built reality—that he will focus his attention, drawing on recent experiences with the Eiffel Tower and through a number of other projects completed over the last thirty years, during his inaugural lecture for first-year students on 21 September 2026 at 3.45 pm.

Bernard Vaudeville is a co-founder and associate director of the engineering consultancy T/E/S/S. Until very recently, he was head of the Department of Civil Engineering and Construction (GCC) at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées.
He has helped to deliver numerous projects, both at RFR and T/E/S/S, including the peninsulas at Terminal 2F at Roissy, the Simone de Beauvoir footbridge in Paris, the reconstruction of Terminal 2E at Roissy, the glass roofs of the Parliament building in New Delhi, the radar tower on the Saclay plateau, and the retractable roof over the Suzanne Lenglen court at Roland-Garros. He led the design work for the building envelope and the glass roofs of the Louis Vuitton Foundation.

Bernard Vaudeville is an Officer of the Order of Academic Palms and, in 2006, was awarded the Medal of the French Civil Engineering Association (A.F.G.C.) and the Grand Silver Medal of the Paris Academy of Architecture in the ‘Research and Technology’ category. He has been an associate member of the Academy of Architecture since 2022.