25,000 square meters of silver-blue polypropylene will hide the Arc de Triomphe in Paris until early October. This posthumously fulfills a wish that packaging artist Christo had cherished for half a century.
When the Bulgarian-American Christo died last year, he already had advanced plans to take care of the French war memorial. This ambition had already arisen in 1962, when as a young artist in Paris he started to exchange packing furniture and cola cans for entire buildings.
Although Christo and his partner Jeanne-Claude were allowed over the years to wrap the Paris Pont Neuf and the Reichstag in Berlin and fill Central Park with colorful gates, wrapping the Arc de Triomphe remained just a dream.
When the Center Pompidou announced a retrospective on the artist, it was seen as the ideal moment to realize the plans. It was Christo’s first wrapping project since the Reichstag in 1995 and also the first since Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009.
The cladding was applied yesterday using aerial platforms and abseilers:
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