The original plans for Versailles — the magnificent 17th-century palace situated about 12 miles southwest of Paris — included a waterfall in the garden. But merely building the Grand Canal that runs through the grounds proved to be a major feat of engineering. To create a cascade proved impossible.
Now, more than 300 years after Louis XIV (the Sun King) transformed his father’s hunting lodge into a glorious symbol of French power, artist Olafur Eliasson — famed for the “New York City Waterfalls” (2008) — is, in his own words, “making the impossible possible.”