For me, 2024 was a terrible year. Business in the engineering sector was slow due to the sluggish construction market in France, French elections and politics were mired in uncertainty, there was the war in Ukraine, and steel prices, which had been rising since the COVID-19 pandemic, continued to rise. January was marked by a family crisis: my mother-in-law was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and my wife, who is Canadian, had to return to Toronto.

In the midst of striving to reconnect with clients to boost sales and keep the business running, the idea of a 3000-meter tower took root in my mind on February 1, 2024. After years of calculating steel structures, pressurized pipelines, pressure vessels, and shell-and-tube heat exchangers, I woke up one morning with the image of this tower vividly present in my imagination. Although I hadn’t yet done the mathematics, I was convinced it was possible to design a steel structure of this height. At first, I envisioned a 2000-meter tower. But as I began researching other tower projects worldwide, it quickly became clear that 2000 meters would soon no longer be a remarkable feat. Therefore, I decided I needed to calculate a 3000-meter tower instead. I started putting ideas on paper, one after another, sketching the outlines of the columns and pondering the equations for both the external and internal panels. From the outset, I imagined the 3000-meter tower as a hollow cylindrical shape, like a concentric reduction pipe fitting. It was a balance between a slender structure rising into the sky and a hollow, inviting form, embodying harmony between convexity, concavity, and flexibility. Very early on, I integrated an analogy with the Eiffel Tower, the French prototype by Gustave Eiffel,which has stood for 135 years.

This article appeared in the April 2025 Issue of BENCHMARK.