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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a Catholic, but I am religious. First visited the Notre Dame Cathedral in 1975. Kind of hard to put it in words but it was a place of great beauty and at the same time I felt a deep sense of spirituality.

The feeling of spirituality was present the entire time that I was in the building. The last thing I'd want this old church to become is the latest Disneyesque attraction. Old school cool is still the preferred way to go.

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I am by no means religious, and yet there are certain places that just feel special. Old churches and monasteries for example, regardless of where they are in the world. I've never been to Notre Dame, but Mt. St. Michel has that feeling. As do medieval churches and cathedrals in general. Or monasteries in the Himalaya. Or Petra. No modern day church comes close to that, and even medieval churches that were modernized, Barock or later, loose a lot of that feeling.

No modern day church comes close to that

That is just not true. There are plenty of great modern day churches if you go looking for them, they're just not tourist attractions.

I feel the same way, I'm not religious too and still feel that those places are very special. I think it helps me empathise with religious people. When I'm in a church, I can understand a little bit better what people mean when they say they are religious, have faith, believe in God.

I wasn't religious the first time I visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. But some places seem to have a certain air about them that really inspires introspection and wonder.

I'm not going to conclude that these places bring one closer to a deity, but they most certainly do stimulate the senses in a fashion that is both unusual and comforting. Yet no single sense - not sight nor smell nor hearing I think - really register anything unusual. And the experience is most certainly not personal, rather many people report similar feelings in such places. Though I won't rule out placebo effect because they've been told the place is "holy".

How much of that je ne sais quois can be attributed to the age of the building, the scale and the handcrafted nature? Will that feeling be lost if a 1:1 replica is created?

I wonder what the original designers and craftspeople would have thought? If they would be in favour of a facsimile or an entirely new reinvention using contemporary architectural ideas

Most of the effect must surely be attributed to the conscious choices explicitly designed to make you feel small and pious, right? Though I think for some people a fair bit of the experience comes from thinking it is very old and holy, so if you tell them it's a 1:1 replica they'd be disappointed.

Probably the original craftspeople would be hella jealous about reinforce concrete and insist on building some big towering monstrosity that doesn't respect the architecture around it. That was after all what they set out to build, a big hopping temple to god that puts everything around it to shame: give those guys a big budget and reinforced concrete and you have a new flight hazard in the middle of Paris.

Whenever a cathedral suffered fires or collapses, or simply when a section went out of fashion and they had plenty of spare money from trade, they would indeed rebuild entire sections in a contemporary updated style; so I think that answers your question.

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