Notre Dame: Builders to Restorers

The fiery near-destruction of Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2019 has given birth not only to a massive reconstruction effort, still underway, but to any number of exhibits across the world focusing on the Cathedral’s past, present and even future.

The fire, reported worldwide

I’ve been to a number of them, but none has seemed more enlightening and impressive than the one mounted this year at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris’s Museum of Architecture and Heritage, housed in the Palais de Chaillot, just across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.

Rescued statuary being loaded on a truck on its way to restoration and storage

It’s an appropriate venue, since the museum is itself the creation of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the artist/architect largely responsible for Notre Dame’s 19th-century renaissance. Its huge spaces contain casts of monumental French architecture from the 12th to the 18th centuries, copies of murals and stained glass, a gallery of modern architecture and a school to train architects in the restoration of historical monuments.

Interior view, shortly after the fire, with the roof still open

The exhibition is titled “Notre Dame of Paris: From Builders to Restorers,” but it actually tells three stories: one about Notre Dame’s builders and the monument they made, another about the work and philosophy behind its 19th- century period of, depending on your point of view, restoration or renovation under Viollet-le-Duc, and lastly about the work now underway.

Burnt wood from roof beams, roof fragments and disassembled arch parts

A stack of reports prepared for the restoration, and detailed drawings

It’s clear from the exhibits here, as well as at the building site, how complex a job the restoration is, first to assess the damage, then to imagine how to repair it, in some cases calling for skills that have not been in use for many years. The detail is amazing, and the work meticulous.

Statues of the Four Evangelists, to be restored to their place on the spire

Among the more complex projects is restoring the ‘forest,’ the network of oak beams that formed the ceiling when Notre Dame was built, nearly 900 years ago; old-growth oak trees from several regions of France were harvested and cut using techniques and tools not used for centuries. Proposals for a steel replacement or for updated techniques were considered and rejected.

In addition to the building itself, there are hundreds of paintings, windows and sculptures to be restored; some of them were already in need of work before the fire and awaited funding that is now available.

The organ also is getting significant work; some of the pipes are on display in the exhibition

But all this work, rushing toward re-opening by the end of next year, embodies choices that have faced restorers and rebuilders before: What is actually being restored? Is it the vision of the 11th century builders who started the work? of the 13th-century revisers who worked in a somewhat different Gothic model? or that of later architects, much of whose additions were ripped out by Viollet-le-Duc in the 1850s?

Viollet-le-Duc himself, seen in his workshop in a sculpture by his friend Adolphe Geoffroy-Dechaume, had an answer that wasn’t all that popular in his time, but it is consistent throughout his work. He wrote that “restoring a building does not mean maintaining, repairing, or redoing it, but rather reestablishing a complete state that may never have existed at any given point in time.”

In other words, his intent was to create the Gothic building that might have existed had it not taken centuries to build and had later builders not chosen to go with the styles of their own times.

Shortly after the fire, there were many discussions about how Notre Dame should be restored, ranging from demands that nothing should change to proposals for a huge swimming pool on the roof.

Some of Viollet-le-Duc’s working sketches for his proposals

Clearly, the path chosen is one that would be familiar to Viollet-le-Duc. There are changes underway in lighting, in pathways through the building, in surrounding spaces, but the result, in the end, is very much the Notre Dame that’s familiar to so many.

1860 photo of the new spire by pioneer photographer Charles Marville

Clearly, as the exhibition shows, the current restoration of Notre Dame gives more respect to Viollet-le-Duc’s work and philosophy than he gave to those who went before him. But who is to say, really, if that is right… or wrong?

Viollet-le-Duc’s color swatches for various chapels in the cathedral