Can the Eiffel tower be converted into a commercial and/or residential tower? I’d imagine that putting up cladding and floors might be technically possible, but I don’t understand high rise construction well enough to know if this would be feasible.
If so, how much usable square footage would we be talking about?
I doubt that the tower is designed to carry all of the extra weight of the floors and walls and supports and everything else, plus the weight of stuff that you would actually put on those floors.
You could beef up the tower to support everything, but at that point you are basically rebuilding the entire tower (or most of it) anyway.
Has it ever been occupied, in any sense of the word? Protestors or stunts?
Same question goes for Statue of Liberty, come to think of it, another French monument.
There is one apartment…
Old metal, like used in bridges, is not like new metal. (Composition, cracks, fatigue)
Yes. Old iron structures like that do suffer from cracks and corrosion. It was made of very high quality puddle iron, very nearly steel, strong and more ductile than common wrought iron or cast iron, but it has it’s limits. I’m sure it was overbuilt, but all of it’s weight and forces on it concentrate in it’s legs and at the base. Even using structurally reinforcing walls to hold the added load of the floors and people and stuff in it the legs may be in danger of buckling, and wind shear might rip it from it’s base. However, with proper reinforcement you could make a building out of it. However if you add enough reinforcement you could do the same thing if it was made of popsicle sticks, essentially replacing the super-structure.
So. . . eventually, we might have “The Leaning Tower of Paris?” Cool.
It already leans several inches to the North due to the uneven heating of the metal.
Cool. Cite?
OTOH, it’s not doing too bad for a structure that was intended to have a limited lifespan - it was built for the World’s Fair in the late 19th century, and intended to be dismantled after 20 years. Ease of dismantling was a requirement of the design.
I’m not an engineer, but I can tell you this for sure: There is no way you could turn it into a building cheaper than designing & constructing a new building of equal size. Not even close. In fact, you couldn’t convert it without having to spend several orders of magnitude more money…
The tower is a very lightweight structure, weighing only 7300 tons. It may well be over engineered as most structures were in the 19th century, but it wouldn’t be able to support much more weight.
Which mostly just means that the shape of the Eiffel Tower isn’t very close to the shape of a cylinder, so a cylinder containing it would need to be wastefully large.