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Oct 14, 2024

Paris Olympics diary: Scaffolding, street closures ahead of the opening ceremony.

This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here. If you’re enjoying our coverage from Paris, join Slate Plus to support our work. The official mascot of the Paris Olympics is a smiling,

This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here. If you’re enjoying our coverage from Paris, join Slate Plus to support our work.

The official mascot of the Paris Olympics is a smiling, rubber-legged red triangle called Phryge. While there exists a feminist reading of Phryge’s physiognomy, it is officially a Phrygian cap, the symbol of the French Revolution immortalized in Delacroix’s famous painting Liberty Leading the People and the preferred headwear of the Jacobins who guillotined Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in the Paris square now known as the Place de la Concorde. The symbolism, this time around, is not “Seize the assets of the Church and execute the king” but “Revolution Through Sport” and “Freedom.”

If we are mining the French Revolution for symbols, though, I’d like to suggest a different element of that fateful day in 1793: scaffolding. On the eve of its big party, Paris is positively decked with scaffolding, security barriers, and all the other portable metal components of a city in flux—all the way down to the city’s central monument, the cathedral of Notre-Dame, which sits snugly in its carapace of steel tubes.

This kit of hundreds of thousands of pieces represents the best and the worst of these Paris Games, whose gambit is to stage the Olympic festival right at the heart of the city.

For the best, look at the Place de la Concorde, with its Egyptian obelisk surrounded by aluminum-scaffolding bleachers, where spectators can watch BMX, breakdancing, 3-on-3 basketball, and skateboarding. Old heads will roll.

These and a dozen other sports will compete in temporary venues. Erector-set arenas have sprung up like crystals in the city’s traffic circles and parks, often with Parisian landmarks as backdrops. There are temporary pools, temporary television studios, and temporary bleachers to watch the swimming events in the Seine, where there is a temporary floating halfpipe.

In person, seeing a competition at the Eiffel Tower, on the Invalides, or at Versailles promises to be unforgettable. On TV, it will be the realization of the fantasy that many American sports broadcasts can accomplish only with a drone or a blimp miles away—the sport and the place as one.

Most of these modular venues “broke ground” this spring, and they will vanish faster than they were constructed, permitting Paris to avoid the white-elephant Olympic stadiums for obscure sports that cost billions of dollars and linger for a lifetime. The current Paris aesthetic recalls the radical architect Peter Cook’s 1964 vision of a “Plug-In City”—flexible, impermanent, incomplete by design.

Eric Limasset, the French president of scaffolding giant Layher, estimated that his company has furnished 400,000 metal components for the construction—tubes for the verticals, horizontals, and diagonals, joined together at disk-shaped hubs, and a brand-new lightweight aluminum platform, the “flexbeam,” developed for the challenge. That’s a lot of puzzle pieces, but by weight, it’s a low-carbon miracle: The bones of all these venues together weigh no more than a couple thousand cars. “Modern scaffolding is like a big box of Meccano,” Limasset says. “You can build anything.”

What’s more, this citywide Olympic superstructure won’t just get thrown away: Its components will be recycled into the anonymous hardware of modern life. This time next year, some façade repair crew at a suburban Paris apartment building will assemble and climb a scaffolding from which some athlete delivered the performance of her life.

The other side of Paris’ metal armature is less appealing. This is the security cordon around the venue sites and especially along the Seine, which is the forum for the opening ceremony. It’s impossible to overstate how disruptive the preparation has been. All but four major bridges joining the Left and Right banks in central Paris have been closed for a week, dividing the city in two and cutting neighbors off from friends, clients from merchants, and tourists from restaurants—a fast before the Olympic feast.

David Coussi, head of the scaffolding division at the industrial giant Altrad, estimates that his company has furnished between 60,000 and 80,000 steel barriers to the French state for the Olympics, shipped across the sea from its plant in Tunisia. These too are not a one-time investment. “They’ll find themselves at a protest in Paris, for 15 or 20 years,” he predicts. Or at the Tour de France, another Altrad client.

Inside the Olympic security zone, traffic is nonexistent and the sidewalks are quiet or fenced off; many restaurants have opted to begin their summer closure earlier than expected. The banks of the Seine itself have been off limits for weeks. More than 60,000 police, soldiers, and security professionals have been put on duty. Le Monde has called it “the most significant security apparatus ever put in place in France during peacetime.”

Was it worth it, just for a big floating parade?

In any case, all this metal has given the city a new look, undermining the myth that Paris never changes. On the contrary, as Baudelaire wrote, the form of a city changes faster than a mortal’s heart. Despite or perhaps because of the city’s historic urban fabric, its leaders have never been shy about trying something new. A short list of aesthetically disruptive experiments includes the very sophisticated piece of scaffolding known as the Pompidou Center, I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapping of the Pont Neuf and the Arc de Triomphe, and Anne Hidalgo turning the east-west Rue de Rivoli into a giant bike lane. The Olympic experiment follows these ventures in its spirit of possibility—cities can change, and they must.

More than anything, the 2024 Games recall the city’s tradition of Universal Expositions, France’s version of the World’s Fair. Those events drew tens of millions of people from around the world to marvel at the wonders of the day, which were housed in temporary buildings on public space. One of those structures for the fair of 1889 was an assemblage of interlocking iron girders designed by the French engineer Gustave Eiffel. The development of cast iron had prompted a revolution in structural engineering, but usually it was buried inside masonry or otherwise hidden, like Eiffel’s framework for the Statue of Liberty.

Eiffel’s new creation was all structure, its splayed legs angled to withstand not the weight from above but the horizontal force of the wind. Parisians hated it; the novelist Guy de Maupassant wrote that the presence of this “disgraceful skeleton” had driven him from France. But before long Parisians came to love it, and it was left in place. Today the Eiffel Tower may be the world’s most recognizable building; it’s definitely its most beloved piece of scaffolding, and it’s the television backdrop of the opening ceremony.

Like the Eiffel Tower, some part of this Olympics will last beyond its time. It could be a building, like one of the city’s temporary pools. It could be a bad habit—privatizing public space and forcing city dwellers to use QR codes to get home. It could be an idea, like a city center free of cars. Sometimes, if you want to know if something will stand, you have to try building it.