Haste makes waste: President Macron's statements about rebuilding the Notre Dame Cathedral

I'm not surprised that President Macron has made bold statements about the rebuilding.

First, that it will be done in 5 years, in time for the Paris Olympics.  (It took a bit more than two years to rebuild DC's Eastern Market after a catastrophic fire, a much smaller building and simpler task by comparison.)

Second, that rather than rebuild the spire (which granted, only dates to ) as is, they'll be holding an international competition, which likely will yield some kind of new probably ersatz design not in keeping with the historic architecture of the building.

-- "The competition to redesign Notre-Dame’s lost spire is already on," Fast Company

The statements remind me of other politicians making bold statements about similar things.  Because they rule by fear*, for fear of getting fired the leader's staff won't question the decision but work to attain it, even though it is unattainable.  When they fail, they'll get fired anyway.  (This was a problem with DC's former mayor, Adrian Fenty.)

WRT the spire, the subhead of the Fast Company article lays out the dilemma:

And it exposes an eternal rift in historic preservation: to recreate, or reimagine entirely?

From the article:

The debate is already raging. Notre-Dame’s former chief architect, who was responsible for the building for more than decade, described his stance to Reuters, suggesting that an exact replica wouldn’t really be faithful to the spirit of a building that had already been so “heavily modified,” but that “we must recreate the cathedral’s silhouette and rebuild the spire. That to me is indispensable.” A group of Viennese architects drolly suggested a condo where the now-ruined rooftop once sat (“Quadimodo’s Penthouse”). The conceptual artist Wim Delvoye, who has used gothic architecture as an inspiration for much of his recent work, pledged to enter the competition and use contemporary fabrication techniques to rebuilt the spire, saying he felt “strongly called upon to contribute to the reconstruction of this monument.”

It’s worth pointing out just how much of a pastiche Notre-Dame already was–in part thanks to Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who was appointed to restore the run-down cathedral in the mid-1840s. Viollet-le-Duc was a romantic and a medievalist, with his own wild ideas about how Notre-Dame “should” look. As Jacqueline Banerjee, associate editor of the Victorian Web, writes, he designed the building’s now-lost spire, basing it not on the original but on a completely different, contemporary tower. He even designed himself into the building, as Banerjee explains, adding a statue of “St. Thomas, bearing Viollet-le-Duc’s own likeness, and holding an aid to draughtsmanship.”

So the idea that contemporary architects would ever be able to recreate a “true” replica of Notre-Dame ignores the fact that the building is itself a mixture of eras, designers, and histories. Another famous church, not so far away from Notre-Dame, offers a case study in the way modern architects can preserve ruins but add their own voices.

I think the argument that the building is a pastiche is somewhat facile. The building is clearly gothic, even if it's been altered here and there over time.

Architect and author Stephen Semes, in The Future of the Past: A Conservation Ethic for Architecture, Urbanism, and Historic Preservation,, lays out this argument in terms of creating "architecture of its time" or "architecture of its place."


From the review of the book from Traditional Building Magazine).

From the review:

This book rejects the Modernist ideology that is embedded in current preservation philosophy, which has led to government promotion of architecturally dissonant construction in historic places. Instead, Semes argues persuasively that visual wholeness and architectural continuity of historic areas should be the paramount design imperative. In many historic settings, new traditional architecture provides the best route to harmony with existing building fabric, and Semes calls for rethinking preservation policies that have blocked the use of compatibly styled traditional design.

For a long time I was pretty doctrinaire about the superiority of historic architecture as a defining element of communities and cities and as an essential requirement in sparking urban revitalization.

Image from the Daily Mail article, "Will London's skyline become an eyesore? 250 high rises are planned for the capital - including the 'Can of Ham' and the 'Pinaccle'," 2014.

Now, I am less doctrinaire. For example, with Bilbao, its historic architecture is "strong enough" that the city can withstand the insertion of modern buildings, thinking of them more in terms of their being sculptures/sculptural almost like public art.  This is probably true for London too, despite how "garish" the new "sculptural" buildings such as the "Shard" end up sticking out.

And modern buildings, if they get the ground plane right, can work in an urban design sense.

And speaking of "architecture of its place," in the right settings, you can see how Bauhaus architecture or brutalism works not unlike the concept of terroir in wine making and food production (e.g., rice in Japan).

Emirates Spinnaker Tower, Portsmouth, UK.  Source: Wikipedia.

But plopping something modern on an 800 year old building usually won't work. It's just too contrapuntal.

Notre Dame is a listed UNESCO heritage site.  But that won't protect the building per se from a wild spire.  If France goes ahead with something like that, UNESCO would pull the listing.  For some places, the threat of that is enough to change their course of action.  For others, not so much.

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* Years ago, I read an article in the New York Times about management and collaboration versus the execution of power ("Managing; The Parables of Corporate Culture," 1991).

It contrasted two people, Charles Revson the leader of Revlon, and Thomas Watson, the leader of IBM.  Both were stopped by security personnel when entering a building, neither had their corporate identification.  Revson fired the guy immediately--"he should know who I am!"  Watson merely stated: "she was doing her job the way she was trained to do it."