Paris icons - Arc de Triomphe

The Arc de Triomphe or Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile, is one of the most famous monuments in Paris. It stands in the centre of the Place Charles de Gaulle (originally named Place de l'Étoile), at the western end of the Champs-Élysées. The monument was designed by Jean Chalgrin in 1806, and its iconographic program pitted heroically nude French youths against bearded Germanic warriors in chain mail.

The Arc de Triomphe (which in English translates to the "Triumphal Arch") honours those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars, with the names of all French victories and generals inscribed on its inner and outer surfaces. Beneath its vault lies the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I.

Paris icons - Pyramide du Louvre

The Louvre Pyramid or Pyramide du Louvre is a large glass and metal pyramid, surrounded by three smaller pyramids, in the main courtyard (Cour Napoléon) of the Louvre Palace (Palais du Louvre) in Paris. The large pyramid serves as the main entrance to the Louvre Museum.   It was completed in 1989, and has become a landmark of the city of Paris. It was commissioned by the President of France François Mitterrand in 1984, and was designed by the architect I. M. Pei.  

For design historian Mark Pimlott, "I.M. Pei’s plan distributes people effectively from the central concourse to myriad destinations within its vast subterranean network... the architectonic framework evokes, at gigantic scale, an ancient atrium of a Pompeiian villa; the treatment of the opening above, with its tracery of engineered castings and cables, evokes the atria of corporate office buildings; the busy movement of people from all directions suggests the concourses of rail termini or international airports."

Paris icons - Eiffel Tower

I was in France recently for a seminar, and had a short 3 hour tour of rainy Paris ... We stopped at a few Parisian icons, including the Eiffel Tower of course. I only just found out that more then 200 million people have visited the tower since its construction in 1889 and that it was the most-visited paid monument in the world! Here are a few shots captured with my Nikon D7000 and Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 lens.

The Eiffel Tower (French: La Tour Eiffel, nickname La dame de fer or 'the iron lady') is an iron lattice tower located on the Champ de Mars in Paris, named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower. Erected in 1889 as the entrance arch to the 1889 World's Fair, it has become both a global cultural icon of France and one of the most recognizable structures in the world.

View from the Trocadéro, which is an area of Paris in the 16th arrondissement, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.