Alberto de Palacio’s Monument to Christopher Columbus

Engraving of Alberto de Palacio’s design for a monument in memory of Christopher Columbus. The monument featured a massive globe topped with a full-scale replica of Colombus’s ship. Engraving originally from The Scientific American.[2]

The phenomenal success of the Eiffel Tower has impressed upon the projectors of coming exhibitions the idea that they must strive to rival (if not to surpass) that unique structure by some colossal monumental work.

This is the first sentence of an article from 1891 announcing the proposal pictured above.[1] Designed by Spanish engineer Alberto de Palacio, it was a monument to Christopher Columbus, to be built for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. It’s quite telling that the first thing the article mentions is the Eiffel Tower, which was the tallest building in the world at the time. The author was using verticality to enhance the appeal of the proposal, which was already quite attention-grabbing on its own.

The monument’s main feature was a massive globe, 1,000 feet (305 meters) in diameter, topped with a full-scale replica of the ship Columbus sailed with. Around the equator of the globe was a viewing platform, which bisected a spiral ramp that ran the full height of the globe. The bottom half of the ramp was inside the globe, while the top half was outside. The base housed a mix of functions, ranging from semi-public scientific institutions to public entertainment venues. De Palacio estimated the cost of his monument to be $6,000,000.[2]

The most intriguing part of the proposal is the spiral ramp. It was nearly four miles long, and visitors could travel from bottom to top via a tramway. De Palacio was effectively creating an exploratory trip around the world, similar to the trip Columbus took when he reached the Americas. Visitors would ascend the monument and culminate the journey at Columbus’s ship. By placing the ship at the summit, de Palacio was giving it the most importance, as if to say Columbus had conquered the world. It was symbolic of how Columbus’s voyage brought the world’s continents closer together.

It’s common for proposals like this to use verticality to enhance their appeal, but de Palacio goes a step further and compares it directly to the tallest building in the world. He also designed the globe to be 1,310 feet (400 meters) tall, which would’ve been 325 feet (100 meters) taller than Eiffel’s tower. In this, he was attempting to capture the pride of the French people for having constructed the world’s tallest structure, in order to build appeal for his own design. In the end, the design proved too costly to build, and it’s massive silhouette would’ve cast much of the fairgrounds in shadow. Years later, de Palacio proposed a similar monument for a park in Madrid, but the same economic challenges prevented that one from getting built as well.

Check out other unbuilt designs here.


[1]: “Palacio’s Design for a Columbus Monument.” The Manufacturer and Builder Vol. XXIII (January 1891): 18.

[2]: “M. Palacio’s Design for a Colossal Monument in Memory of Christopher Columbus.” Scientific American Vol. 63, No. 17 (25 October 1890): 260.