You would think that the Tour Eiffel site is majestic enough as it is, but Paris believes it can do much better for the 2024 Olympic Games. The city is redesigning the tower’s surroundings, and the renderings look gorgeous.
The new landscape design project has been created by Kathryn Gustafson and Mary Bowman, cofounders of London-based landscape architecture firm Gustafson Porter + Bowman. The company won the City of Paris’s Site Tour Eiffel Competition with a plan called OnE I. It will span 133 acres, featuring new trees on both sides of the Seine river connected by the Pont d’léna (Jena Bridge).
Right now, the space that surrounds the Eiffel Tower is full of roads that break up the public areas that extend from the Palais de Chaillot and Trocadéro to the Place the Fontenoy, perpendicular to the tower.
The new project–which will be completed in 2023 to be ready for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games–aims to eliminate these roads by burying them underground, lay down new gardens, and change existing ones. It will also increase the variety of trees in the area to improve its biodiversity. Even the Pont d’léna will see its asphalt roads disappear completely to be transformed into a pedestrians-only green area dotted with 26 trees.
During the games, a temporary beach volleyball court will also be installed near the base of the tower, following the Olympic Games design masterplan by architectural design firms Populous and Egis.
According to the creators of the landscape design proposal, the new gardens are conceived to evoke the union of two historic landscape typologies: orderly, classical French gardens and the country’s picturesque gardens, which are wilder and more organic.
The landscaping is expected to be maintained long term by the city of Paris.
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