Jonathan Morrison
What next for Notre Dame and why it still isn’t safe
Our architecture correspondent Jonathan Morrison on the threat posed by the weather and disagreements about the design
We have had proposals for a swimming pool, a greenhouse and types of glass ranging from the structural to the stained. And with an unedifying willingness to turn the sublime into the ridiculous, architects from around the world have proposed turning the roof of Notre Dame into a car park, a big top, a penthouse for Quasimodo, a spaceport, a McDonald’s and even a showroom for LVMH, the luxury goods colossus whose owners donated €200 million for its reconstruction.
Yet while a raft of specialists work to survey and stabilise the 850-year-old cathedral after the fire that tore through it in April, it remains unclear how the destroyed roof, with its distinctive spire, or flèche, will be replaced. President Macron quickly vowed in the inferno’s aftermath that the medieval sanctuary on the Seine would be rebuilt “so that it is even more beautiful than it was”. France’s prime minister, Édouard Philippe, pledged that there would be an international design competition to replace the 93m spire — which was not an original part of the cathedral, but an addition by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, its restorer, in 1859 — with one “adapted to the techniques and the challenges of our era”. It prompted a number of internationally famous architects, including the British architect Norman Foster, to cast their wide-crowned hats into the ring, and a variety of publicity-hungry nobodies to dream up ever more surreal provocations.
A design by Vincent Callebaut Architectures
Macron settled on an ambitious deadline of recreating Notre Dame within five years (presumably to coincide with the 2024 Olympics) with the help of his billionaire friends, but some French parliamentarians had other ideas. At the end of May the Senate passed a bill stating that the reconstruction must be faithful to the “last known visual state” of the building, and that the use of any new materials would need to be justified, potentially ruling out a crystalline flèche — one of the more common contemporary ideas. Yet last month it was overruled by the National Assembly, the lower of the two houses of the French parliament, which is dominated by Macron’s En Marche! party. The result is a law that does not directly address what form the reconstruction, and consequently the design of the spire, will take, but mostly outlines how the €850 million pledged by individuals and corporations will be dispensed. The squabbling is likely to continue.
Nonetheless, the public seem to have sided, rightly, with the Senate. A recent poll (by YouGov) suggests a narrow majority of the French supports a faithful reconstruction of roof and spire at the Unesco world-heritage site, which is owned by the French state and loaned to the archdiocese in perpetuity, while 1,170 experts and officials have signed an open letter published in the newspaper Le Figaro calling for a cautious, conservative approach and “time to diagnose”; the chief architect of Notre Dame, Philippe Villeneuve, has said it might take several more months to establish how stable the structure is before work can begin.
Yet time may not be on the cathedral’s side. There are fears that the recent record-breaking heatwave may have further damaged the stonework, still waterlogged from firefighters’ hoses, after soaring temperatures accelerated the drying process, and that more heatwaves — Paris reached 42C on Thursday — might prove disastrous for the vaulted ceiling. “What I fear is that the joints or the masonry, as they dry, lose their cohesion and their structural qualities and that, all of a sudden, the vault gives way,” Villeneuve said last week. And if not the heat, then heavy rainfall of the sort experienced in April may be as serious a threat.
So while rescuing the cathedral from the conflagration was undoubtedly a minor miracle and required a heroic effort from the Parisian firemen, there’s probably only one thing that is clear at this stage: there’s still a very long way to go before this most beautiful of buildings can be declared truly safe.
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