Roland Barthes was a French philosopher and literary critic who wrote on a wide range of topics from mass media to semiotics. His most famous books include Mythologies, S/Z, and The Fashion System.
 

"Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience."

— Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies