The Miraculous Resurrection of Notre-Dame
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It wasn't even the original roof! It was rebuilt with little concern over faithfulness to what existed before, not two centuries ago by Viollet le Duc.
After the fire, they were some neat proposals for a glass roof, or some wild ideas like a walkable, vegatalized one. But even without going there, nowadays it seems like old stone is sacred and we can't touch it anymore, ever.
We would never have had the glass pyramid in front of the Louvres or the Eiffel Tower with this mentality.
I'm was not against making something new (like what Violet le Duc did), but everything was so lazy and dull I'm really glad they got dismissed.
> We would never have had the glass pyramid in front of the Louvres
This is big misunderstanding: the glass pyramid wasn't built by replacing parts of the Louvre: it was built in place of the parking lot of the ministry of Finances! (And yet, to say it was controversial back then is a massive understatement)
Also Parisians now aren't against new things, we've been numerous to sign a petition to make the Olympic flame aerostat a permanent feature of the city.
The McMansion Hell lady introduced me to the idea of "PR-chitecture." You'll see it everywhere once you're familiar with it, including many other fields of design.
* https://www.archpaper.com/2020/06/opinion-no-pr-chitecture-w...
* https://mcmansionhell.com/post/618938984050147328/coronagrif...
We're talking about a medieval catholic cathedral.
How many cathedrals in the world have glass roof or walkable garden?
Do you think a walkable garden at the top of a cathedral would be respectful of the christian faith or do you think only other religions deserve respect? Put it this way: you put your walkable gardens on top of christian cathedrals, I build up tennis courts on top of mosques and swimming pools on top of synagogues.
Private (owned by the church) churches, synagogues or mosques are not under that statute. But then they have to pay the maintenance themselves.
Notre Dame is paid by public taxes so its fate and purpose are decided by the French public, not by the church, although of course its opinion is taken into account.
It's the same reason many churches in other countries and up transformed into apartments, libraries or destroyed altogether when the Church can't pay for them anymore. It's not a question of "respect" for a religion or another.
Personally I find nothing disrespectful about putting a walkable garden on top of a cathedral.
> Put it this way: you put your walkable gardens on top of christian cathedrals, I build up tennis courts on top of mosques and swimming pools on top of synagogues.
I don't understand what you compare a hypothetical walkable garden on a cathedral to a tennis court on a mosque or a swimming pool on a synagogue. I think it better to compare a walkable garden on a cathedral to a walkable garden on a mosque or a walkable garden on a synagogue. Whether that is disrespectful is up to the individual.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/15/swimming-pool-...
Sure, why not? They're just buildings, and that sounds like fun.
And I'm pretty sure that as far as the Christian faith is concerned, one isn't supposed to put value in the temporal universe or its constructs, and a grand cathedral is as meaningless to God as a mud hut.
I respect the opinion of the majority which clearly wanted to keep it as it was, I am merely expressing a slight disappointment over the final decision.
Also, why would adding more modern features to the church be disrespectful to christians??
And no, the church has been rebuilt many times since the middle ages. Each time differently, reflecting the era.
I can't really say which would be best myself, but the point is since the roof is already the not historical part of the cathedral, it makes little sense to rebuild it exactly in that precise not historical way. Instead, it could keep being the one evolving part of the building.
The last time Notre-Dame was rebuilt, by Viollet le Duc, it had been left in ruins for over a century and was redesigned as an idealized version of what it never was. So we are only preserving this version of the past by rebuilding it this way.
Also, a glass dome over the collosem would be hideous, which I think is reason enough not to do it :)
Let's say this giant is at one end of the spectrum, and the Mona Lisa is at the other. Its subjective where you place cathedrals, but certainly the builders intended it to be an operational building, and throughout its history there have been additions and modifications.
What exactly is different this time so that we do not leave a piece of contemporary history in Notre Dame?
Context: French, huge amateur of Middle Ages history.
Don't be so quick to judge your contemporaries, as today's turd may very well be tomorrow's jewel. The Eiffel Tower was considered a useless monstrosity back then, with many people (including famous authors, artists, and architects) opposing its construction.
Furthermore, some architects and engineers are deliberately provoking ire by designing ugly and offensive structures. I mean, in what reality would someone enjoy having their eyes and senses brutalized by a Brutalist? It's sadomasochism on a civic level.
Eiffel strikes me as sort of a utilitarian skeleton piece; a proof of concept that made Lady Liberty a reality. But yeah, the tower itself is still kinda ugly, especially in comparison to the graceful and sinuous surroundings it was plopped into. I must admit that any true fan of Erector Sets would find it somewhat cool.
Notre-Dame, as a building, embodies Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, just as her faithful people do, and the edifice stands to project the Gospel of truth. I'd never object to a veggie garden, but perhaps let's not encourage gardeners to clomp around on the sacred roof.
John 20:15
Parisians hated it when Haussman rebuilt the city under Napoleon III, now it's considered one of the most picturesque cities in the world. Parisians hated it when the Eiffel Tower was built, now it's the symbol of France across the world and the most visited monument in the world. Parisians hated it when the pyramid of the Louvres was built, now new presidents do their inauguration speeches in front of it.
Point is, contemporary architecture is always ugly. Give it 50 years and it becomes historical and beloved.
Survivor’s fallacy. This doesn’t change that 98%+ of architecture has been ripped out and remodeled after 50 years. And some never catch on - almost everyone hates brutalism.
I am pleased that you and the entire world uniformly consider Paris objectively beautiful, and I have no choice but to abandon my foolish, subjective judgements!
(Pro tip: symbols aren't expected to be beautiful or attractive, as long as they're accurate. Consider a long list of ugly and repulsive symbolism and synechode. Everyone knows that the Venus de Milo's arms were taken, and that's a reason for its fame.)
There is no shortage of people who are offended and repulsed by beautiful objects. Something or someone can be quite objectively beautiful, good and true, yet be considered unwanted or distasteful. Perhaps contemporary Parisians were more rankled by the excessive progress, destruction, and upheaval, than the architecture in itself? Greeks and others maintain ruins of formerly beautiful sites, in deplorable condition, yet people still visit the ugly pile of rocks?
Not believing that there is such a thing as objective beauty is a recent phenomenon. Going back to ancient philosophers and in to the Italian Renaissance, the consensus was such a thing existed:
* https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/
And we don't have to go that far back to find it, as as 'recently' as the Victorian era architectural designs were based on such principals (such as the golden ratio):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-0XJpPnlrA
Having different be elements proportional to each other was basic stuff pre-WW2:
* https://www.youtube.com/@BrentHull/search?query=proportion
> Point is, contemporary architecture is always ugly. Give it 50 years and it becomes historical and beloved.
I'm not sure (m)any people find beauty in most of the brutalist buildings that are now ~50 years old.
Some of Le Corbusier's works are noted:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Architectural_Work_of_Le_C...
but I'm not sure how many would be called "beloved".
see https://www.livescience.com/how-egyptian-pyramids-originally...
I'd be more impressed if Egypt restored the Great Pyramid to something close to how it looked when first built.
That said, the Great Pyramid is a historical site, not an active worship site, and modern archeological sensibilities prioritise conservation. A restoration like that might make it hard to answer future questions about the pyramid.
Or perhaps leave old things as they were and build new things according to current ideals?
Could you share more about what you mean by this?
But on the other hand I'm totally unbothered by the Royal Ontario Museum, or the big symbolic "wave" crashing down on a Japanese colonial building that makes up the shape of Seoul city hall, or the Union of Romanian Architects building.
and I'm in love with the L’École de Musique et de Théâtre in Louviers because it was used to extend and enhance the beauty of the original.
Basically, it can go really wrong or really right.
We know that the previous construction of the Notre-Dame was beautiful, but we don't know what kind of nonsense we could end up with with some really over eager starchitect trying to make a point.
I loved the design when I originally saw the architectural drawing and models. The blend of modern with traditional. The way the crystal reflects part of the museum's mission.
That said, the resulting building is hideous when seen at street level. The finish of the structure makes it look like a tornado dropped an oversized aluminum garden shed on the museum, then they never bothered to clean up the mess.
Architects can design some really beautiful structures, but it can go really wrong for reasons other than over eagerness to make a point.
(Or maybe I was bitter about them dropping the free Tuesdays around the same time. Not only was it an affordable night out, but the museum was much more lively with the visitors and special events.)
(Of course, I'm not French, so my opinion has no weight in the matter)
We would never have had the glass pyramid in front of the Louvres or the Eiffel Tower with this mentality.
thats not exactly what success looks like. making a pyramid is super low effort architecture wise.
There is a general pattern that I unfortunately see too often with this kind of "post-modern architecture":
*it cannot stand on its own*.
I will tell you a secret: nobody is interested in that glass roof, except the jet set in Dubai.
Those insecure nihilistic bullshitters are bored and it shows because what they create is usually very boring. Art is hard and in a century there are only a few that can find a new voice. A medieval cathedral is not a play ground for anyone, let alone some commercial studios.
Artists need to learn to stand on their own.
Why not contribute to this piece of art? Be it a glass roof or something less controversial. To me, merely repairing is like admitting the building is dead.
At that very time there was a sudden break with the times before. With the industrial revolution, man's environment began to change in such a way that poets and writers romanticized nature, as well as the past. Romanticism had begun. Young fields such as Psychology, Archaeology and Biology took off. New materials such as concrete and steel provided a break with the past in terms of possibilities and forms of expression.
People in that century who were on the cusp of a new age for men; where the cityscapes of Van Eyck disappeared on the horizon.
The restorations in the 19th century were indeed not informed by sufficient knowledge, it shows how people thought what it should have been originally or how it should have been completed. In Europe, many of the 19th century restorations were undone where they could, when one could find out what it had been like, for example. As an example, many changes to dispositions in church organs have been undone in this way in more recent times, based on historical-scientific insights. Often nineteenth-century changes turned out not to be an improvement but a fad.
Later, with the flight of the scientific method and appreciation for objective knowledge came the realization that if we want to preserve valuable things from the past, we will have to conduct research so that we can restore in a responsible way.
So for the same reason, we will not modify the Night Watch to suit our current tastes, thankfully. The Night Watch is not dead, quite the contrary.
The glass pyramid in front of the Louvres and the Eiffel Tower are separate buildings. A better example would be the Bundestag, but that's a secular building and the glass dome here is a message of renewal and transparency.
Why? On a conceptual level, wouldn't a glass roof allow the people to feel closer to the heavens, while still enclosed by the holiness of the cathedral?
On an iPhone, you can also use the DNS method, but Safari supports extensions so you can install a proper ad blocker as well.
It’s absurd that opening a news website is more intense than running a game with a million baloons on-screen at the same time (without any slowdown).