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.
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.
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?
Hell yea, let it be ruined, let the weeds and the vines thrive on its remains and make it ten times as beautiful as she was
Lol. Cool from a universal perspective but I live in a city with plenty of run down buildings and I’ve gotta disagree. Make it a usable building or make it a useful or usable green space. Land is finite, wasted space in cities leads to sprawl elsewhere
Yea absolutely, it would be open, like a park
Did they give Quasimodo his room back?
Yes, but they tripled the rent
yay ! Homeless people can fuck right off and keep sleeping in the rain though
Doing all that for “only” 700M Euros – and in five years! – is a miracle in itself. Well done to all involved!
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 👍
As a native American, fuck the French and every gilded church they build. As their people profited off of the rape of entire nations, they don’t deserve nice things in any context. All my SEA homies agree.
I don’t think there’s such a thing as a gilded church.
As a human being, we could try to make progress in the world and not be divisive? The past is full of shit behaviour (understatement), we learn from it and try to not make the same mistakes again.
Optimistic of you to believe that humans learn from mistakes. Id thought we’d all come to the conclusion that colonizing ethnostates were bad, but Israel didn’t seem to get the memo. I thought we were done with nazi appeasement but then we have Jill and Joe old money taking nice pictures with the dictator elect. I even thought once upon a time that electric cars might make a dent in the fight for the climate, but then I saw what a lithium mine looks like. Nothing matters to humanity except how greedy they can be without being rejected from society at large.
You are very bitter and I feel sorry for you. Your hatred of the french is precisely the kind of attitude that leads to all the things you are raging against here. I hope you get the help you need and find some more happiness.
Discipline is a core tenant of righteous hatred. I feel no enmity for anyone of French descent. I just hate the French as a concept. Same for the British, the Dutch, Spaniards, Belgians, Germans, Russians, Israelis, Chineses, etc etc all the way down the list of opressors both historic and modern. While yes, a nice little Thanos snap of all those evil peoples would leave the world massively underpopulated, I have faith that the desirables that are left would figure out repopulation no problem.
So after reading your manifesto, you hate yourself then also?
What are your thoughts on the Khmer Empire?
Look back far enough and everyone is a monster
Exactly; not to minimize what the French did (it was horrible even by colonial standards, although not quite as brutal as the Belgians) but if we went after every former coloniser like LordGimp does, there’d hardly be anyone left. I’ve never seen “anti-colonialist” people talk about expelling Arabs from North Africa, or Turks from Turkey — it’s directed only at western countries, seemingly completely oblivious to the vast tapestry of warfare and abuse perpetrated by others even while Europeans were still living in mud huts.
Which western country am I going after if I say “free Tibet”?
It’s never been about western overexposure or who is culturally dominant in what category, it’s about greed. It’s ALWAYS been about greed. And 700 million dollars for a monument to slavery, cultural obliteration, and toxic patriarchy is extremely greedy.
Which western country am I going after if I say “free Tibet”?
It’s been years since I’ve seen or heard anyone say this, but maybe that’s just me. In any case, thanks for bringing it up — anything China-related tends to be controversial here.
It’s never been about western overexposure or who is culturally dominant in what category, it’s about greed. It’s ALWAYS been about greed. And 700 million dollars for a monument to slavery, cultural obliteration, and toxic patriarchy is extremely greedy.
If we were talking about the 19th century I’d agree wholeheartedly, but I really don’t think that fits here. N-D was built centuries before France (or anyone else) had ships capable of making it even a fraction of the way to SE Asia. The word “colony” was something used in a historical context while discussing the Greeks; not a government policy. The same goes for slavery, which was extremely uncommon in Europe at that time (but fairly widely practised in Africa and the Middle East). Slavery was only embraced by Europeans during the age of sail and colonisation.
All that to say, what you’re saying is right in its historical context, but this is not at all that historical context.
