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Comment by pricklyPaper | Hacker News Reader

For the last half-decade or so, an architectural historian named Andrew Tallon worked with laser scanners to capture the entirety of the cathedral’s interior and exterior in meticulous 3D point clouds.

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Laser Scanning Reveals Cathedral’s Mysteries | National Geographic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAi29udFMKw

This seems to be about a cathedral in Washington, D.C., not Paris.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/208826-mysteries-of-notr...

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/150622-andrew-ta...

Talk about Notre Dame.

He passed away last year, glad to see the legacy of his work.

Should the interior be recreated as it was, or simply rebuilt in a new way? Attempting to recreate it might result in never-ending comparisons to the original.

The interior under the vaults would be suffering from water damage rather than being burnt & collapsed, so it's (hopefully) going to be restoration job over a complete rebuild. I'm not sure what the best thing to do about the internal roof framework would be though; making the unseen structural parts historically accurate seems to invite more risk than its worth.

That is a good question that is very complex to answer. This isn't just a historical building, it is a building. There was one (two?) pipe organ inside that were used for beautiful music, modern design can improve the acoustics making the music better. This was a cathedral, I assume still in use for worship, could modern design help that purpose? This was a beautiful example of historical architecture, should we recreate that exactly to add study of architecture? This is a valuable building site in the middle of Paris, they could build a skyscraper to better use the land.

Those are just a few of the competing concerns. There is a good argument to be made for each (even the skyscraper), whatever you choose will be at the expense of the others. We are forced to have this argument now: expect a lot of shouting and nobody to be happy with the end result. Try to see all sides. (I was going to say help to a reasonable compromise, but then I realized that compromise is not always reasonable)

>There is a good argument to be made for each (even the skyscraper)

I'm curious...what's the good argument towards replacement with a skyscraper?

Prime spot right in the middle of Paris? (though, with maximum height regulations in Paris, a skycraper there wouldn't be very tall)

If you can remove yourself from bias towards history and culture this is obvious. If you cannot do that no argument will make sense.

Don't get me wrong, there is value in history and culture. However sometimes being able to step outside it and see alternatives is useful.

No compromise would be reasonable. You either preserve the cathedral, modernize it, or build the skyscraper (this one won't happen, so we can safely discuss it). Anything in between would be worse than the extrema for everybody.

Skyscraper will never happen. One was built at Montparnasse in the 1970s, and it was immediately regretted ("The Awful Tower").

Skyscrapers are quarantined outside the city itself, at La Defense.

I cringe at the "modern" aesthetics that someone might wish to inject into that place.

Hm. The design of Notre Dame was the highest-tech architecture of its day. I wonder if, ironically, folks resisted the Cathedral being built at all for much the same reasons above?

Why would they? In those days if you didn't keep your head down, it would've been chopped off.

That's wonderful. Do you know more about that, by any chance?

I've seen the 5mm resolution quoted on reddit. Not bad.

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