The restoration of Notre-Dame cathedral has been used to advance political and commercial agendas, but its true significance is as an exemplar for sustainable, craft-based construction, writes Paris-based architect Andrew Todd
Do monuments like Notre-Dame de Paris – when heavily restored – retain their capacity to accept, absorb and reflect collective emotions of the most significant order, relating to war, revolution and the trauma of terror? Can they lose their aura, suffer from amnesia, defeating their eponymous purpose, ‘monere’, to remind?
Our Lady is a beautiful gem woven into the psychophysical fabric of the city and state. She is the national ‘kilometre zero’, the omphalos, the sacred geographical tethering point in our constitutionally secular country. She also reverberates with her immediate context, grounded in the natural and urban conditions of central Paris. Facing west, a storytelling stage-front facade addressed dense medieval alleys until Haussmann scythed back the city to augment her object value. North, she presents a tight, finely sculpted streetside; south, glistening in the sun, sits her most beautiful flank, embellishing the river with its diaphanous presence; and from the east, she flaunts the all-round sculptural magic of her stern, right on the fluvial axis.
She sits close to the original Roman crossing of cardo and decumanus, on the founding island of the city; everything flows from and through her. Saint Paul’s is not quite so ingrained to London: he is a magnificent hilltop sculpture parachuted onto a fire-cleared site, atop a Mithraic Temple; and he is also the oeuvre of one man (making his own self-declared monument), whereas Notre-Dame is the product of an anonymous collective working over three centuries.
Notre-Dame’s familiarity, rootedness and seeming ineluctability amplified our shock at her conflagration. That afternoon I sat in the adjacent Préfecture completing my French citizenship interview. The final question was a softy: ‘You’re an architect; tell me about French heritage.’ ‘Just look out of the window,’ I blithely said. ‘She’s been there 850 years, she will always be there.’ The fire was perhaps already smouldering; an ensuing celebratory dinner turned into an anguished, smoke-suffused wake under an orange sky, as lead dust was deposited on our window sills. The city suffered in concert.
The joy at the cathedral’s recovery from this trauma prompts some introspection. This unique building is a kind of talisman or revelation of cultural truth over time and, as with any major renovation, caring for the past should involve being honest and clear about the present. Even before the appalling fire, she had reeled with historical jolts.
Turned into a secular ‘Temple of Reason’ after the revolution (as other monuments, like the mighty Cluny Abbey, were demolished), she hosted at one point an odd land-art installation of a real lawn and grassy hummock in the choir, her decrepit walls cheaply made over with whitewash. Napoléon’s choice to platform his autocoronation in such a charged edifice also required heavy relooking, draping the entire building with tapestries and bling. In Jacques-Louis David’s immense painted emperor-selfie commemorating the occasion (now in the Louvre), the cathedral is entirely unrecognisable (which was perhaps the key message: a historical site ingested and transformed for the purpose of power projection).
Victor Hugo charged the crumbling edifice with meaning and a new esteem through the immense popular success of his novel Notre-Dame de Paris. Capitalising on this collective favour, Prosper Mérimée (librettist of Carmen and the first inspecteur des monuments historiques) entrusted her rejuvenation to the duo of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus, whose joint age was even lower than that of Piano-Rogers when they won the competition to erect a similarly gossamer (and fragile) structure just across the river.
Viollet was – to put it mildly – a rather driven man, obsessed with rescuing a specifically French quality from the medieval, whereas the preceding century had ventured into the supposed objectivity of international neoclassicism. After Lassus’ early death, Viollet – thereby unbridled – proposed the fanciful flèche and sky-saints descending from it, imprinting his own face onto Thomas, patron of architects. Facing deeply backwards in time, he also stood on the threshold of future change: the contractors who metal-clad his retrograde spire would go on to dress Bartholdi and Eiffel’s Statue of Liberty.
Viollet left a hefty conundrum for us. He single-handedly invented the discipline and practice of historic preservation but did so in a wildly inconsistent manner. Erudite and respectful of the past, he was also prone to megalomania, obsessed with Mont Blanc (of which he produced the first map), hypothesising its original pointy (and thus more gothic) shape.
In Notre-Dame we get his care and wilfulness as an inextricable package, so compelling as finally to cancel out the embarrassing attempts by our contemporary colleagues (and our president) to find glory in proposing a further layer of narcissistic new. Smarter voices (Nouvel, Koolhaas) bowed before le Duc. Nothing to add, they said. Once the fanciful rooftop pools and kinky spires had withered away in our minds, the path to renewal – at least physically – was quite clear and very fast.
Much less clear – especially in France – is the intangible and complex question of how time is carried forward in these monuments. Emmanuel Macron complimented her on a recovered ‘blondness’ and ‘glow’ – characteristics that have more to do with the perky new lighting scheme than her light grey stones. It also rather sounds as if he is complimenting an older woman for fixing herself up.
One can hardly quibble with the urge to wipe off Notre-Dame’s accidental soot, taking other patinas away in the process. However, the urge to purify, simplify and reboot to a non-existent originary point has plagued other major renovations in France. Both Chartres and Paray-le-Monial now manifest a dodgy youthfulness, covered in slap, all features equally bright as a button, whether baroque or early medieval; all conversations between timeframes extinguished by a presumptuous present leaning into a fictitious past. Henceforth, botoxed to the keystones, these masterpieces will not age gracefully. They both smell and feel to the touch inauthentically fresh. By this logic, Notre-Dame should have been restored to gaudy polychrome. But perhaps the thick layers of emotion she has accumulated – -de Gaulle’s wartime return and ambush, our commemorations of recent terrorist atrocities – keep time flowing, and repel abbreviating, stultifying paint.
How she was ritually reawakened, propelled forward again, is therefore a question of considerable interest. Paris already had one vast medieval mystery play last year in the form of the Olympics opening ceremony, threading through the city along the river. Notre-Dame featured and was victim of an egregious elision: her dedicated, acrobatic ‘craftspeople’ segued directly into malletiers lovingly assembling Vuitton suitcases at their HQ just downriver– to my mind, overreaching product placement and association by a leading donor to both the games and the renovation. The Olympics ceremony was so joyously eccentric and inclusive that it is hard not to see Notre Dame’s reopening as the revenge of the ageing white conservative male.
The ritual was over-egged at times, and subject to unholy geopolitical circumstances. Archbishop Laurent Ulrich battered the door with a phallic staff sporting a huge blue bauble, a ritual object of no small significance which bordered on sci-fi kitsch. Once inside, he implored his organ to ‘awaken’ which it did, four times, with blasting improvised turns that had a bracing Sun Ra quality (the Great Organ – part of the building’s central musical history – has its own historic monument status independent of the cathedral, like a sort of Thunderbird 4 in the belly of number 2).
There was a certain ‘lenteur’ to proceedings, as if the church authorities were milking the global airtime previously accorded to the more forward-looking Olympic celebrations. The service had some unscripted stand-outs: Donald Trump was parked waiting on his own in the front row (lest he bother Jill Biden), a glowering Quasimodo-like misfit, probably annoyed by the warm ovation given to Volodymyr Zelensky as he entered.
Trump had intervened during the fire, exhorting squadrons of Canadairs to douse the flames, a suggestion that fire chief Michel Bernier had to take time off from his rather busy night to quash, as it would have been ‘technically impossible, undoable and, most of all, totally useless … like bowling with the cathedral’. Hopefully, they didn’t have to hobnob at the reopening.
I’m tempted to think that the cathedral will shrug off these shenanigans, and pronto. She is not a luxury product to be flaunted by patrons or coddled by politicians in need of a boost; she is playing a longer, more universal game. The real protagonists of this rebirth hold axes, chisels, trowels and adzes rather than camp phallic staffs. My friends in the Compagnons du Devoir, a pseudo-holy guild of artisans, raged like wounded beasts after the fire, enthused to apply their skills in the service of a higher purpose.
Whilst the billionaire class clucked about enabling craft excellence, a strange parallel process was taking place: a vast eco-pirate hive – worthy of Patrick Bouchain or Assemble – was buzzing and growing around the exclusive use of zero-carbon, lovingly-sourced bio and geo-materials, fashioning myriad hand-made splices and grafts of old and new. This was anything but luddite: drone-gleaned LIDAR found unprecedented pertinence at scale alongside hand craft in their reconstruction work.
Serendipity played a part too. While students at the Chaillot Historic Monuments School in 2014, architects Rémi Froment and Cédric Trentesaux had undertaken a hand-drawn survey of the entire ‘forest’ roof structure, thereby allowing its comprehensive identical reconstruction. Froment ended up running the rebuild job.
Perhaps the key lesson of this phase of Notre-Dame’s exalted existence is prospective rather than nostalgic. If we are to adapt to the effects of our self-made onslaught on nature, our future building sites will have to look much more like this loving hands-on eco-community than assembly lines of oil-enabled, high added-value products and components sourced from afar. It is a pointed paradox that this grass-roots efficiency was enabled by the state escaping its own constraints, creating a crisply-organised public body specifically for the renovation which was not subject to the normal stifling conditions of permissions and procurements.
Let’s hope that the vast craft kinship engendered at kilometre zero can spread across the country and beyond.
Andrew Todd registered as an architect in France in 1999. He is Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.
The author wishes to thank Shawn Evans, Quentin Charluteau and Agnès Poirier.