Transcript of Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Daily. On Sunday, after a fire that many he feared would destroy it, and a swift renovation that defied all predictions. The Cathedral of Notre Dame reopened to the public. Today, Chief Architecture Critic, Michael Kimmelman, with the story of the Miracle on the Seine. It's Wednesday, December 11th. Michael, welcome to The Daily. Thank you, Michael. Pleasure to be here. I'm just going to acknowledge that we have been trying to get you on the show for seven years, and then two days more, because over the past couple days, there's been a tremendous amount of very serious news.

The government in Syria fell a closely watched manhunt for the suspected murderer of the CEO of a major healthcare company.

That case got cracked wide open, all of which delayed this much début of yours on the show.

Today is the day you, our chief architecture critic, finally here talking about something worthy of your biography, Notre Dame.

So welcome. Well, better late than ever, I hope. Yes. Well, just to begin, do you remember the first time you stepped inside that cathedral? I remember as a boy going with my family, and we had come from the Soviet Union, where I was unable to find milk. I was probably eight. Paris, it turns out, has milk. It was cold, but I do remember going into the cathedral and feeling somehow warmed when I went in there. That was my first impression.

I guess it stuck with me in some way.

Your memory of it is vague, but the impression I'm getting is that whatever it did you, it did something.

Yeah, I think it does to millions and millions of people who have no religious connection to it. It was a place that people imagined they had to go to if they went to Paris. You didn't see Paris unless you went to Notre Dame. Let's fast forward a good deal to several years ago. Where were you when you first heard that Notre Dame was burning?

I remember very vividly where I was. I was on my bike rushing to an appointment on the west side of Manhattan.

My phone rang, and it was an editor here at the times who sounded a little frantic and told me I had to rush back and write something because Notre Dame was burning.

I thought he was crazy. Crazy, why? Because Notre Dame has a giant stone building. I didn't think it could burn down, and it sounded inconceivable.

It's like Everest. It doesn't burn down. The pyramids do not burn down. There you go. I I said, I'm sorry to tell you this, but his name is also Michael. I said, Michael, that doesn't make sense. He said, I think you just better look on your phone. I went to find a live feed, and there it was. I'm now turning to the back of the cathedral. It is a terrible scene here. The roof has entirely collapsed. There are flames coming out of the back of the cathedral as if it was a torch. It looks like the Olympic torch from the back. I remember standing there on the corner, just frozen, staring at this site, which seemed inconceivable. And then Twitter was just full of #prayforparis, hashtag, and everybody was suddenly fixated. Maybe it's the sign from God. I don't know. It's not normal. It really was as if the world had stopped. I see people crying. I see a lot of emotions, and I'm shocked myself. It's like your family loses somebody.

Both my sister and I said, We are actually feeling a physical pain watching Notre Dame.

You feel like it's part of you. Then when you look at this 12th century medieval cathedral up in flames, it's like a knife. It's very hard for me not to cry right now. And I've been crying on and off the whole day.

It just has touched me and touched everyone in France, I think, very, very deeply.

It occurred to me at that moment, too. That's interesting. I mean, Why had the world stopped? Why did this building mean so much to so many different people? Not just people in France, but obviously all around the world. I rushed back to my computer. I started making a few phone calls and trying to figure that out, trying to understand what the building had meant over time. To see really what the building now represented to people what this potential disaster.

I mean, it was certainly a disaster, but there was the fear, of course, that the building would disappear, that this would be the moment after almost 900 years that we were living at that moment when this building would go away. Well, I'm curious.

When this inquiry is moving along and you're making phone calls and you're researching the history of Notre Dame and trying to understand why the feelings about its burning are so widespread and so deep, what do you find? Well, I think, Michael, you have to step back and say, what is the meaning of a building? I mean, for me, architecture is really the world we built and are building. I think a lot of people have talked about it as a esthetic thing, and that is one aspect of it for sure.

I think the conversation around architecture for a while, saw it as a branch of sculpture, whether buildings were cool-looking, they were fetishized, aestheticized.

There's definitely an aspect of that that's important in architecture. But I've always felt that really architecture is much larger than that. Buildings are They're doing things that exist in our lives, in our neighborhoods, communities, cities. They're there whether we choose to look at them or not. They have to be used. Really, they raise these questions of what do they say about us as a society? In the case of Notre Dame, it's been speaking. It's meant things to people generations, over centuries, for almost a thousand years. Well, tell us a little bit about that history, and I suspect through that, we will understand it has meant to us during that entire period. Well, I think the building has had a lot of meanings over time. You, first of all, have to see where it sits geographically. It sits at the center of Paris on an island in the middle of the Seine River.

That island is where what came to be called Paris started. Literally. Literally.

It had been a prehistoric settlement, and then was an ancient settlement. The Romans settled there. It was a gallo Roman town called Lutitia, occupied by the Parisi. I didn't know any of this. There you go. You're welcome. I hope it's true. Then when the church was there, there were original religious buildings and sanctuaries built on the island over centuries. It was invaded by Vikings. Then eventually, in the 12th century, a bishop of Paris decided that they should build a Gothic cathedral there. This was the new style. It was a little like the pyramids in the sense that these were buildings of an incredible scale and ambition and weirdness and Majesty, complexity. They were down some of the old church buildings, which were on the east end of the island, and started erecting this building. Since then, that was in the 1160s, the building has remained the center of the city. It's essentially actually witnessed the growth of the city. It's been the sun around which the city has revolved. It's the place from which all distances in France are measured, literally. There's a plaque on the Plaza in front of it. In other words, all French roads, quite literally, lead to this cathedral.

That's right. In a sense, everything circulates around it. But I think also it has witnessed a lot of important events in French history. Mary, Queen of Scots, was married there.

Napoleon was coronated there. When the revolution happened, you had the Insurgents of Revolution, they ransacked Notre Dame.

It was a symbol. They They located the church. They knocked off the heads of the Old Testament figures on the front who they thought were kings, and they melted down the bells and turned them into cannon balls and coins. It's fascinating because what could better embody the idea of a single building's importance to a place, then it becomes a central target of an effort to overturn the entire system? Yeah. By the time of Napoleon, right after the Revolution, the place was a wreck.

It was a dump. It had been ruined during the Revolution, but it was also falling apart. When Napoleon decided to have his coronation there, it was so bad that he had to get a couple of architects, like very high-level interior decorators, to basically hang a lot of tapestries to cover up all the mess behind it, like a stage set.

Then that also caused Victor Hugo, the writer, to write a book about a hunchback bell Ringer in which he- I've heard of it? He spends a chapter lamenting what had happened to Notre Dame, that this was said, what it said about France and what Notre Dame meant to the country. I don't think we can miss an opportunity since you brought it with you to read from the hunchback of Notre Dame. Yeah.

He wrote in, shall we say, ripe prose and in long, voluptuous sentences. But I'll read you a couple.

So first of all, he begins this chapter about Notre Dame. He says, The Church of Notre Dame de Paris is without doubt, even today, a sublime and majestic building. But however much it may have conserved its beauty as it has grown older, it is hard not to regret not to feel indignation at the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and men have wrought simultaneously on this venerable monument. It's a call to arms. It's a call to arms, exactly. Great buildings, he says, like great mountains, are the works of centuries. The man, the individual, and the artist are erased from these great piles which bear no author's name. They are the summary and summation of human intelligence. Time is the architect, the nation, the builder, which I think is interesting, Michael, because that's the point. Notre Dame, for him, represented France. So its recovery, its preservation was about France's preservation, its heritage, its strength. Hugo had no particular patients with the church, but he believed that the building itself meant a lot to the nation. That book came at the same time as a movement was rising in France to preserve its heritage. Those two things led to the restoration of Notre Dame in the 19th century to prevent its collapse, basically, and to restore it.

That was a key moment in the history of not just Notre Dame and Paris, but the whole idea of historic preservation globally. It reminds me of what you said at the beginning of this conversation about architecture, is that this is not some abstract piece of architecture. It's living, it's breathing. It tells us something essential about who we are at any given moment. Hugo, as you said, he's not saying that through an especially religious lens.

He's seeing this more as a secular temple. A palace of the people. That's right. He saw it as representing all sorts of romantic ideals about the people, about community, about glory. That book helped inspire the renovation of the cathedral in the 19th century. It was brought back. We got the spire that then became famous on Paris skyline.

Hugo's book also made it more of an attraction. People wanted to come to Paris to see the building. Eventually, Disney wanted to make movies about it. People from all over the world came. More of them then went to see the Eiffel Tower in Paris. More of them then went to visit the St Peter's Basilika in Rome. In that sense, it really did become truly a palace of the people. What did this fire say about us, about this moment? The horror of it was that our moment would be the moment when this building across this great arc of history would disappear. What did that say about how we had cared for It was a fire. Even the fact that it was on fire was clearly an indication that we'd been derelict. It was a fire that never needed to happen. It wasn't a great world war that had destroyed other cathedrals. It was a guy who probably left a cigarette butt, lighted in the rafters. Then somebody else who went to the wrong place to check out why there was an alarm. It seemed so banal, and it seemed like it said something about us in this moment.

Well, since you just brought it up, remind us how severe this fire ends up being. It was really severe.

It started in the rafters, and the rafters are made out of oak wood and spread to the spire, which is made out of wood, too, and lead.

Right. You were wrong when you were on the bike telling your editor it couldn't burn.

There's a lot of wood in that cathedral. I was extremely wrong.

It wasn't just the roof was on fire and the spire was collapsing. It was a It was a very dangerous and complex thing for the firemen to try to put this fire out. They couldn't dump water from above. The cathedral might collapse. It was a building they didn't want to use powerful hoses in. They had to go inside and try to put it out. There was a point at which they went into the Bell's towers to prevent them from collapsing. If they had, the whole building would have gone down.

What started as a fire started by a cigarette, but was really a existential crisis for Notre Dame and for the world.

The question immediately became, what do you do after one of the world's great, important, essential, beloved buildings? Is this badly damaged? There were different answers to that question. At first, it wasn't clear what would happen. There were a lot of proposals to do something crazy on the roof, to use essentially this calamity as an opportunity. Crazy like what? Well, the French Prime Minister hastily proposed that there be an architectural competition to re-imagine the roof. That's an invitation for every Wackadoodle proposal you can imagine architects salivated the prospect of such a proposal. So circulating online pretty quickly were all sorts of things: swimming pool, garden. Someone came up with the idea of a giant carbon fiber gold leaf flame to replace the spire. Well, that's on the nose. Yeah. It actually bore uncanny resemblance to the logo for a chicken wings franchise in Colorado. There were a lot of those things, but relatively soon, cooler heads, including some prominent French architects, persuaded the French government to do the right thing, which was to restore the cathedral as it had been. That became the mission. Macron, the President, even while the building was still smoldering, promised that it would be restored in five years, which back then seemed not just a hale Mary, it seemed completely crazy, impossible.

To you, too.

Everybody. Yes, I thought it was nuts. I even told my editors there was absolutely no way this would happen in five years. 20 years. We'll check in in 10 years. Don't worry about this. There's nothing really to see here. It turns out I was wrong again. And Here we are, five years later. The building has been reopened. It's on time, on budget, and it's incredible. It's a miracle.

We'll be right back. Michael, tell us how how France did this, how they pulled this on time miracle off?

Well, the President, Macron, assigned a general to run the operation, named Georges Allain, and he ran it like a military operation. They cordoned off the cathedral. It meant you had essentially a mystery in plain sight. You couldn't see what was happening on the other side of it. They shared what information they wanted. Otherwise, it was really impossible to get a look. I had wanted embed myself there from the beginning to watch the process and to try to see what was going to happen day to day because I thought it'd be an incredibly interesting project to follow. They certainly weren't having any of that.

They basically told you, no way.

They were preoccupied, and I understand. They surrounded the cathedral with this wall that told you information about Notre Dame and eventually showed pictures of some of the workers. But you can never see on the other side of You would occasionally see stuff going on in the cranes, obviously on the scaffolding. But it was really hard to know what was going on for a long time. Finally, after five years of begging and pleading and leaning really heavily on our wonderful colleague, Aurélien Breeden, in Paris, we got the word in June. We could come in one day, next week. I didn't know what that meant, whether we had an hour or 45 minutes, whether we had two hours. We had that all I didn't know who we were seeing, but I packed my bags and flew to Paris. Right.

This is not exactly living inside the cathedral as you had originally thought, but you have this chance. Tell us about this one day you get to go inside.

I land in Paris. I meet Aurelian for breakfast nearby. We walk over the cathedral, and we're told we have to strip naked and put on basically a hazmat suit. I'm sorry.

What?

Yeah. I was a little taken aback, and I asked a couple of times, naked naked?

Like French naked?

I think what this probably was about was a hold over from the fact that there had been concerns about the lead. A component of the original construction. Right, of the spire and the roof. They wanted to take extravagant cautionary steps to make sure everyone came in and out, was not taking lead out from the cathedral. But by this point, that was a moot issue. But fine, I would have done anything. I go through a security turnstile and enter this container village, invisible from the outside, almost. But there it is, hundreds of workers, a real beehive. We're meeting the woman who's going to take us around, and we go to this construction elevator and rise up to the roof, which was incredible seeing Paris in a way I'd never seen it, seeing the cathedral in a way I'd never seen it, seeing the workers there who seemed, on the whole, remarkably happy. Are you happy you are here?

A bit, yeah. A bit? Only you.

I understand. Construction sites are not usually happy places, particularly. It's a lot of stress. There was certainly a lot of stress and concern here at deadlines. But there was a really different atmosphere, a different vibe.

What was it?

I think for all of the stresses, there was a shared feeling of a mission. People were working on something that was bigger, longer lasting themselves, and that they were proud of. That's the job I think I'm not going to do again. At least not on this roof. There are many times when I could have left, and I haven't left Why? Still not boring. They would go home at night and they could say to their spouses, What did you do today? I worked on Notre Dame. What did you do?

And It's an impossible thing to match.

Hard to top. That's something of what I felt from talking to some of these workers as well. There was a collegiality. Some of them worked for competing firms, but here they would share hammers and help each other out.. We are all really friendly together. They were doing all sorts of stuff. They were laying down sheets of lead, they were erecting the spire. Most interestingly to me, they were rebuilding the rafters, this complex of beams. All that wood that had burned. Exactly.

Five years ago.

It's beautiful. Really beautiful. So I go through this, basically a hole in the roof and enter this forest of reconstructed rafters. Very beautiful, these trusses that had been rebuilt. It was providential.

What do you mean?

Well, Before the fire, the cathedral was in disrepair. The roof was leaking, some of that wood was rotting. Repairs had started on the cathedral, but also there were some people who tried to document the cathedral. There There were a couple of French architects who'd gone up into the rafters in the spire and recorded every detail of what there was down to the finest degree. There was a Belgian scholar who had used LiDAR to do a digital scan of the cathedral from all different sorts of points and gathered a billion points of data. It was amazing, which gave the workers a map, effectively, of the cathedral down to the width of a pencil eraser. So the reconstruction could be extraordinarily faithful. What I learned from the workers was that each tree that had been cut down in forests across France had been specifically chosen to match the peculiarities of the beam that it would replace, the medieval beam, which had been faithfully studied before. That's really interesting because he's basically saying they did the opposite of what the middle-age carpenters did. The middle-age carpenters, they found a tree, and then they worked with that tree, and they did the opposite.

They looked at what they had, and then they had to look for a tree. That matched what they had. Yeah, exactly. They had to reproduce.

I'm trying to envision people going out into the forest of France, looking at trees and saying, That one is worthy of that beam. You'll remember François and the rafters up there, Cut down that tree.

Exactly. Then the carpenters today, using the same old hand tools, made sure that the contours of that beam, down to all sorts of peculiarities in the Middle Ages, were exactly the same. This wasn't just for authenticity's sake. The same method. Yeah, it's incredible, really, because you're reviving ancient techniques. Not for folklor. But also because there was a reason why they had 800 years. That's pretty good. Exactly. No, that's pretty good. This was because the previous beams had lasted for 800 years. Then they had tattooed back into it the medieval Carpenter's original mark. If there had been beams that had been reconstructed in the 19th century, they added those back That's extraordinary. Yeah. It was especially extraordinary because not just was it faithful, but it was something that the public will not see. It wasn't done for tourists. It was about something else. It was devotional.

Devotional to the original workers and the original mission and meaning of this entire cathedral.

Exactly. Devotional to the techniques that dated back, really, thousands of years. One of the things that was going on here was to help to resuscitate what are basically artisanal ancestral crafts and techniques. There's a group called the Compagnon du Voir, which dates back to the 12th century, group of artisans. And There were more than a thousand applications when the decision was made to restore the cathedral, people who wanted to participate in this project. That was in some ways one of the most beautiful things about Notre Dame. One of the guys who was from that organization had said to me that it's a reminder of the dignity of labor and of craft. I saw that in the workers themselves because it was not just reopening a tourist site, it was reviving a whole culture. It was sustaining being something that had lasted for nearly a thousand years.

I'm curious, once you get down from the roof and you are witnessing this exceptionally faithful, devotional effort to bring the roof back to what it looked like a thousand years ago, what you saw on the interior, probably the best known portions of Notre Dame.

Entering the cathedral was disorienting at first. First of all, it was a construction site sill. There were people moving heavy equipment, and there's still a lot of scaffolding and tarp. But pretty quickly, it became clear to me what had happened. I could see suddenly that the cathedral was spanking clean, bright, and I looked up, and there had been all these famous images of the collapsed vaults, these giant black holes in the ceiling, and now they had been repaired. Now you had a new ceiling, and it was spick and span and bright. This kaleidoscopic light coming through these stained glass winges, which survived the fire. But what was also a miracle was that that work in creating those digital maps before the fire allowed the people reconstructing it to even reproduce the sound of the cathedral. Wow. Because every material, every angle, every quality of the building could be reproduced now. One of the organists who works there spoke to about this. A building like that, it's an organ pipe, he said. It's a volume that has a certain function quality. He said, D major sounds really good in Notre Dame. And that is often what you experience when you come in.

It's not just looking at things, it's hearing them, to feel you're surrounded by a particular sound. That's what I was sensing, that the soul of the building had come back in a sense, which included not just the way it looked, but the way it felt and sounded.

Well, that makes me wonder, as an architecture critic, did you have, by the end of this tour, by the end of this COVIDed day that you got, some final assessment of the experience of this restored cathedral?

Yeah, Michael. I think at this point, after nearly a thousand years, no one really needs me to assess whether Notre Dame is a good building or not. Three stars. Yeah. Honestly, it's a little shocking at first to go in, and I think some people will experience this. When the Sistine Chapel was cleaned some decades ago, people had gotten used to looking at all that Roman grime and they'd become attached to that quality of the Michelangelos covered with dirt and looking dark and mysterious aged. Then grime was taken off and everyone thought it looked like a Superman comic. It was just so bright. Now, of course, people have become accustomed to that. I think there may be some of that adjustment.

Basically, you should prepare your sofa going inside a thousand-year-old building that has been power washed.

Yes, that's exactly correct. But I think it looked obviously really remarkable. I did come away with something not just about the building, but a feeling that the project itself represented something very moving. So few things nowadays seem unimpeachable and just good. That was the main takeaway I had about this project. It had not just gone well, but it seemed to be something that brought people together. It seemed to be something people could attribute larger meaning to.

Well, you're getting at the question I've been waiting to ask you this entire conversation, which is, if architecture, as you have laid out here, tells us something about us, what did this renovation, this project project tell us about ourselves right now?

Well, for starters, it tells us that this is not the moment when we let Notre Dame die, that we are capable of bringing it back to life. That's a sign of hope. I Notre Dame is not going to solve everyone's problems. France is still coming apart. Walk down the street, you still worry about whether there's going to be crime and homelessness. I don't want to overstate the case. But I do think Notre Dame reminds us that the The spaces we build give us this sense of community. They give us a sense of each other. The coming together itself, which is what the cathedral is about, is a sign of hope for us. It's the thing that we wish we can do.

It's our best It's our best selves.

It's our best selves, right. Notre Dame is our best selves.

Now it's in the best shape that it's ever been in probably a thousand years. If that's not a sign of human progress.

Yeah. I met a lot of people, Parisians, some friends of mine, who had never really thought much about Notre Dame or actually just found it an impediment on their way to work, all the crowds. They found themselves crestful, shocked, really, by how they felt when it burned. I think that was the realization for many people that this building had a place in their own lives that they hadn't even understood before. It's a touchstone for our sense of our own changing, evolving lives, aging And I think also for the passage of time in a larger sense over the centuries to which we are connected. The building's resurrection preserves that connection. It allows us to think we go back. We haven't lost touch, essentially, not just with the past, but with ourselves. Just before I left the cathedral. I was speaking with a woman who showed us around, and I asked her directly, Are you Catholic? She said, Yes. So I said to her, What does it mean for you to be working on this project? She struggled for a minute to find the words. Then she wept. I thought that said it all, really, that for her, this was also something that she would remember for the rest of her life, that she lived at this moment.

For her, no doubt had religious meanings, but I'd like to think is the power of architecture and can sustain us at a time when we are divided and we sometimes lose hope. Maybe that was the original idea for the people who built the cathedral nearly a thousand years ago.

Oh, Michael, on that really beautiful note, Thank you very much.

Thank you, Michael. It's been a pleasure.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, Israel said it had destroyed Syria's Navy during a series of airstrikes in what it described as defensive measures designed to protect itself against Syria's new government. But the attacks have defied warnings from Western governments who fear they may ignite a new conflict in the region and fear that Israel is using the fall of Syria's government as an opportunity to take offensive actions. As the Mossad government fell over the weekend, Israeli ground forces advanced beyond the demilitarized zone on the Israeli-Syria border, marking Israel's first overt entry into Syrian territory in more than 50 years. Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto and Jessica Cheung. It was edited by Michael Benoît, contains original music by Dan Powell, Pat McCusker, Marion Lozano, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lanferk of WNDYRLE. Special thanks to Aurélien Breeden, Segolen Lestradec, Katherine Porter, and Brian Katz. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.