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Comment by aubanel | Hacker News Reader

Why would you want Notre Dame to represent modern condition ? I'm very happy it was not the way you suggest, because that would have been a high risk of getting a ugly/huge/provocative addition by a modern fame-craving architect, à la Le Corbusier or Jean Nouvel.

This is a 1000 years old church that has hosted France's history, not a company office in Manhattan.

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There are many catacombs in Paris. Nobody knows how deep the system goes. They were there before Haussmann, before the Normans, before the Goths, before the Romans, perhaps even before the Gauls. Your idea of what is French, however, is not what is buried underneath in the collective unconsciousness of the city, what supports it, but instead the reproduction of what people want to believe represents the city. But the Notre Dame no longer exists, it was a symbol of the power of a Medieval state. Paris today is a city of malls, broad avenues and apartments. We kid ourselves to believe that putting it back will "continue" its history: the history is buried under the immediately visible surface, its waiting for you to get lost in it. If we could build something that might unearth that history, perhaps it might be possible to begin to remake the city of Paris once again.

I read somewhere that the catacombs were the result of needing cemetery land for building on.

What an effort that must have been! Convincing people that their ancestors could be extracted from the ground and stored as skeletons in caves underground. What a massive amount of land that must have freed up!

Def not what really happened, since the arrangement down there more closely resembles macabre interior decorations than any reasonable funerary arrangements. The catacombs are the result of Paris being built on top of numerous underground tunnels that have existed at least since the Roman era but were massively expanded in medieval times.

I'v been a lot down the Catacombs, and still go sometimes, but I think you have a too grandiose view of their significance.

Their most ancient existence is as stone carries, the storage of bones only started late, in the XVIIIth century.

They never really held big significance for Parisians.

Source: https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carri%C3%A8res_souterraines_...

Its a metaphor

Then it does not really meet its goal, if it wants to convey the idea that "the true identity is hidden underground" by referring to something that isn't the true identity.

The original creators would have intended the cathedral to be grandest as possible.

That would have cost probably even more than restoring it. It might have been extremely criticized by the public, as a funding grave, a bottomless pit swallowing a lot of funding for foreseeable future. The grandest these days is ... very grand. So grand, that there is no other building worldwide achieving it yet. We have learned a lot and would be capable of a lot, if there was a need to.

>there is no other building worldwide achieving it yet

The Sagrada Familia, which is nearly complete.

an argument could be made that this was a once in a few generations chance to do something different, or at least change/add to the existing design. another argument is that the building saw many changes from ~1180 to today, so change was actually part of the history of the building.

> to do something different

Entirely just to do something different? Or for any actual reason?

I mean things like: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/france-notre-dame-gree...

are just outright plain ugly due to many reasons and this is one of the nicer looking alternative proposals that I could find.

If there's one reason the French can't compete in the modern economy its because they are so painfully conservative in their culture. Elon Musk might be a cook with reactionary tendencies but he is a far more imaginary cook than anything the French can come up with. Did it really all end in 1848?

What ended in 1848? I don’t really get the relationship between these two unrelated things, you’re free to use whatever architectural style you want when building new houses and office buildings in France as far as I can tell.

By that standard other Europeans are even more conservative.. Germans rebuilt the Dresden Cathedral and palaces despite them being a complete ruin for decades. The Polish rebuilt Warsaw, Gdansk and I assume other cities almost entirely from scratch pretty much as replicas of their pre-war state.

What does that say about them?

they cancelled the design competition and went with an identical reconstruction: https://www.thelocal.fr/20200710/macron-gives-blessing-to-re...

part of the reason was to have it ready for the olympics since a design competition would take a long time.

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