Artist Christo is going to wrap another huge structure in fabric. This time it will be the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. And it will take A LOT of fabric. And A LOT of rope. Specifically, it will take 270,000 square feet of a polypropylene fabric and 22,965 feet of red rope. It will be spectacular.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, two artists, had been working on this project since 1962. On their website you can see the sketches from the 1960s, 1980s and from 2017, as well as the most recent version. All of the drawings show that the plans have not changed very much. The whole idea was to wrap the famous Parisian arch with fabric and rope and the sketches look very similar. But it took a long time to make it happen.
Sadly Christo will be on his own to finally create this project, as Jeanne-Claude passed away in 2009.
We hope to get to Paris to see the wrapped work of architecture. We also will update this information once we discover what happens to ALL of that fabric once the project is taken down. Hopefully it will be reused somewhere…
Read more about the wrapping project in the New York Times.