The Arc de Triomphe was wrapped in cloth.

Artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude took decades to realize one of their epic and fleeting projects.

In 1971, the duo began implementing their plans to wrap the historic German Reichstag building in more than one million square feet of shimmering silver fabric. The packaging of the Reichstag was not completed until 1995.

The Gates, the Gates, in Central Park was first designed in 1979, with the 23-mile-long and 16-foot-high saffron tablets finally unveiled above the Central Park walkways in 2005.

Jeanne-Claude died in 2009, and she was Christo's wife and art partner from the beginning, so he focused on realizing the projects they started together. When none of that had been achieved by 2014 and his eightieth birthday was approaching, he said in 2016: "I had to do something so fast because I don't know how long I'm going to live." In those two years, he had completed the floating piers, a project he and Jeanne-Claude designed in the seventies for Argentina and then for Japan, and in 2016 he had not yet gone beyond concept and drawing. With the help of old friends, floating jetties were quickly created in the form of saffron-covered waterways connecting an island to the mainland in the Italian lagoon region.

To celebrate this, the city of Paris closed Place du Nejmeh to traffic during the three weekends approved for its presentation, giving way to the expected millions of pedestrians.

For 16 days, the arch, ordered by Napoleon to honor French heroes and victories, the place where Hitler's invading armies once marched, was wrapped in 323,000 square feet (7.4 acres) of silver-blue polypropylene cloth with bulging folds, moving with the breezes and reflecting the autumn light. The curtain was held in place with a 22,960-foot (4.3-mile) rope.

Christo never stopped dreaming big dreams.

He once said, "No, in fact I'm generally optimistic." "I see that the world is full of misery. I myself was a refugee. I know it's terrible. But I know I survived, I'm very optimistic because I was born like this, and I think things can be solved and it will be interesting.

Christo liked to point out that the monumental artwork he and his wife Jeanne Claude – which temporarily included the Reichstag and the Ninth Bridge in Paris, and the coastline in Australia – are as real and meticulously designed as highways and bridges. They needed the same kind of experts in construction, law, and structural planning, but he was thrilled more than anything because he spent endless hours on site experimenting with chemistry that turned the everyday world into art. "This is the real world," he once told me: "This is the real thing, the real wet, the real wind, the real kilometer. All of our projects require some kind of physical contact with real things.

That experience is everything. It is the culmination of what Christo and Jeanne-Claude described as the two phases of any project. First, comes the "software" phase of conceptualization, persuasion, and negotiation of basic permits. For Christo and Jeanne Claude, the program was not just an introduction to the final event; it was a material like pigment for the painter. It is a process documented in a series of compelling films by film producers Albert and David Maissels, and Bulgarian director Andrei M. Baovnov, where high drama, high stakes and anxiety, thrilling suspense, despair and determination have captured the problem of Christo and Jeanne Claude's production. And then, secondly, in the "equipment" phase, the multiple threads of construction are combined, which in those fleeting days leads to the enjoyment of the technical prowess of everything. Despite all the grueling years and months it took to make, public festivals last no more than 16 days, before they are broken down, materials sold and recycled. The long years of preparation and 16 days of glory come at a high price – at least $13 million for the Arc de Triomphe, the envelope – which Christo and Jeanne-Claude have always self-financed by selling the drawing Christo was drawing for each project.

Christo's last project, the wrapped Arc de Triomphe, was compiled almost as quickly, and even more fascinating is that the project will arise after his death, according to the plans that began with Christo and will be completed by his nephew.

In 2018, once Christo announced his desire to wrap that symbol of French freedom and power, it took one high-level meeting between the artist and officials, and the necessary permits were signed. Christo believes that one of the reasons why the Arc de Triomphe passed the permit process so quickly, is that in the fall of 2018, when the subject first surfaced, "yellow vest" protesters in Paris were demonstrating against rising prices and the unbalanced tax burden borne by the middle class, and French President Emmanuel Macron needed to create some good news. It only took one meeting between Christo and French officials, and the project was carried out.

In his will, Christo gave the green light to the two projects for which he had already completed every drawing and design related to them and the exact details of their implementation. Although his nephew, Vladimir Yavchev, who is the project manager in Paris, and Jeanne-Claude's nephew, Jonathan Henry, in New York, are nearing completion of the encapsulated Arc de Triomphe project, the Mastaba project, a project in the city of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, is still in the software authorization stage. The first project, the Encapsulated Arc de Triomphe, was constructed of 410,000 multicolored stacked barrels forming a 492-foot-high pyramid, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude described this as probably the largest sculpture in the world.