Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration is what everyone alive today knows as “Notre Dame,” and the few images of what the cathedral looked like before the restoration have practically disappeared in the torrent of photos, images, selfies, and films of its 19th century incarnation. It was typical of the campaign to not only restore, but to improve upon the work of the original builders, an approach that is anathema to today’s preservation community but one that, in this case, left the structure with a consistent exterior style and an iconic skyline. Viollet’s version was nearly sixty feet taller than the original and modeled after the later, High Gothic spire at Amiens. There had been a spire on the original church, but it had been removed in the aftermath of the Revolution. Notre Dame, as it came down to us, was a medieval structure cloaked in a Second Empire vision of the 13th century Viollet rebuilt the structure’s flying buttresses, removed later additions that had encrusted the base, constructed a wholly new sacristy and topped the crossing with a new, oak and lead spire. Notre Dame at the start of the restoration process, in 1847. Viollet-le-Duc removed and replaced statuary and ornament that had been damaged, but he also replaced or built entirely anew building elements to bring monuments into conformity with contemporary ideals and images of what the Gothic, perhaps, should have looked like. This overlapped with the emperor’s wholesale rebuilding of Paris, which included Hausmann’s boulevards, railway stations, and new commercial and residential sectors, and Viollet-le-Duc’s ‘restorations’ often involved reconfiguring or even re-designing monuments to live up to the Emperor’s ideal of the glorious era of medieval France. The lost spire was not, of course, a Gothic structure it was built in 1859 to the designs of Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc as part of Napoleon III’s campaign to restore monuments damaged in the Revolution or neglected as symbols of the ancien regime. The French Senate’s reaction was swift, and welcomed by much of Paris. Spires made of crystal, voluptuous, curved greenhouse roofs, the tongue-in-cheek collages of car parks and fast food restaurants all suggested a rush on the part of designers to use the fire as an avenue for cheap publicity, and few of the ideas drew any public support. Online, the results were, perhaps, not contemporary architecture’s finest hour. On paper this seemed like a fine approach. Louis Kahn, after all, famously pointed out that “Beauvais needed the steel we have today.” Fires had often been cause to rebuild in new styles, and on paper the thought of rebuilding a cathedral using modern materials, or with contemporary concerns at the forefront, seemed like an inspired take. Many argued–not incorrectly–that the cathedral had evolved over time, even during the Gothic era, to match changing tastes and cultural ideals. Such a re-visioning of the lost roof and spire was the subject of more than one ideas competition and a flood of unsolicited proposals from architects worldwide. The announcement was no surprise, given that the French senate ordered that the reconstruction reproduce the “last known visual state” of the cathedral, but it puts to rest any idea of a modern reconstruction. Last week saw the announcement by French president Emmanuel Macron that the spire of Notre Dame is to be rebuilt as an exact replica of the one that was lost in the fire of last April.
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