Summary
The newly restored 850-year-old Notre-Dame Cathedral will reopen on December 7, five years after the devastating 2019 fire.
The €700m renovation has revitalized the Gothic masterpiece, preserving its historical integrity while incorporating modern safety upgrades like sprinkler systems.
The project involved 2,000 skilled craftsmen, boosting traditional trades such as stone-carving and woodwork.
Key features, including stained-glass windows and artwork, were saved, while the spire and roof timbers were reconstructed.
It’s wonderful to see such a beautiful part of France’s history restored so incredibly well. My heart broke when I saw it on the news and I hope this brings some joy to the wonderful people of Paris and France. It really is a national treasure and I cannot recommend seeing it in person enough!
L’eau peut nous diviser, mais nous sommes frères et sœurs. Vive la France!
With love from England.
It’s a nice and fitting bonus that it brought a boon to local/traditional trades like stoneworking. Not that it was a good thing, but they seem to have made the best of a shitty situation 👍
Not religious but the stone looks fantastic. The blue on the ceilings. The sharpend look of the checkerboard floors. The work that went into the arches. Having visited it almost 25 years ago, the seeing it had burned was sad. For the sheer work it takes to put a gothic structure back together - it’s beautiful.
Did they give Quasimodo his room back?
Yes, but they tripled the rent
It looks weird all clean and bright.
Notre-Dame was crumbling from hundreds of years of neglect when the hunch-back story renewed interest and the Cathedral was “restored”. She’s burned down several times since then.
Did the reconstruction have to honor modern building codes? Did they use modern building techniques? What about materials?
Notre-Dame isn’t 850 years old. I guess I’m making a ship of Theseus argument, but who can deny that this is a modern building?
if a fire destroyed half of a historic painting, would it be acceptable to allow modern artists to stitch in new canvas and “restore” the charred painting?
Restoration is destruction. The building that stands where that historic cathedral once did is less genuine than the historic recreations in Disneyland and Las Vegas because those counterfeits don’t pretend to be anything else. I recon the near universal human approval of all archival, restoration, and collection projects are all different flavors of death denial.
Understandable to disagree with whether or not restoration preserves the history and soul of an architectural wonder but I have to ask—what’s the alternative? Leave it as ruins? Build something truly modern and uninspired?
