Notre Dame Re-Imagined with Glass Roof | Hacker News Reader

Notre Dame Re-Imagined with Glass Roof

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35 pointsWMCRUN63 comments

Well, for what it’s worth, I like it. Old buildings aren’t always that old - they are added to over the centuries, with parts reflecting the tastes of their individual times. Why not add something reflective of our times?

I sometimes think there is an “English” approach to conservation in which history is something to be preserved with utmost fidelity - and a “French” approach, where history is something you are part of.

This idea seems very French.

Hopefully they go with something this interesting. Moving forward while respecting the past seems like the right approach to me. Even rebuilding it exactly as it was isn't going to please everyone.

One objection might be that a church is probably supposed to be a different kind of architecture from everything else; and the modern glass roof is something we see a lot nowadays in buildings with different purposes.

> One objection might be that a church is probably supposed to be a different kind of architecture from everything else

There are certain design elements that Catholic churches in general (and cathedrals specifically) tend to have related to their specific function, but neither difference for the sake of difference nor anything particular that prohibits a glass roof is really called for; both original and renovation construction of churches (including cathedrals) tends to reflect a blend of architectural fashion at the time and place of construction and liturgical practice of the time (with renovations often blending current trends with the desire for harmony with the remaining constructions and a desire to evoke or pay homage to the replaced components even when not directly reproducing them.)

> This idea seems very French

See also the glass dome over the Reichstag in Berlin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_dome#/media/File:Rei...

Yes, those ideas have been developed by Ruskin in the mid 19th century. He favored minimal restoration and letting buildings die when their time has come over a more continuous view of the life of buildings that can undergo deeper changes. That view was unsurprisingly espoused by none other than Viollet-le-Duc, one of many architects of Notre Dame (he was however very criticized even by the French, so it's a philosophical more than a nationalistic difference for sure).

Why not add something reflective of our times?

Because the value of such an old building is that is a reflection of their times. If you want to reflect your time, build something new.

You are calling for erasing history.

Funnily enough, the glass roof on the Gothic building is not exactly a modern idea. The earliest one i know of is Ruskin's oxford museum of natural history.

I also, perhaps perversely, quite like the idea of housing the remains of the church in much the same way.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/Pi...

Rafel • 10 hours ago If they add a MacDonald's upstairs, it would be perfect. I would go with my children.

What has happened here?

Edit: I got there. It’s a (great) comment from below article.

What you really want is a Starbucks near the door, so the parishioners can get a little pick-me-up before services start.

I always find architectural designs like this very odd, since they seem divorced from anything like customer requirements. It's something like a programmer discussing what Twitter would be like if everyone followed exactly one of seven accounts.

Well there isn't really a customer. It's the whole world judging it. The people who actually make a decision won't have a profit motive but are also responsible for satisfying all those general opinionated people everywhere.

It's intended as marketing, not a serious proposal. It's like how graphic designers publish unsolicited redesigns of Facebook in their portfolio. It's not because they expect Facebook to use them, but because they're a good way of getting attention.

The agency in question here isn't even an architecture firm, it's just a company that produces renderings of the kind you see in marketing collateral when buying off-plan properties. Someone there realised this Notre Dame business was a good opportunity to get some publicity by publishing a deliberately radical idea, and it seems to have worked.

That's a good analogy and probably a better mental model to judge it by, but I was thoroughly disappointed by the architects' rationale.

"We also wanted to mix traditional wood and new materials to find the right balance between history and future"

"What could be more natural than paying homage to this place through a real vegetated space?"

That kind of literalism sounds like it's right out of the mind of a first year architecture student.

My first thought was no no no no no.

But I'm warming up to it. ultimately, if 70 years from now they decide to restore it to its original form, that's always an option. But the original roof is gone, whatever is put there now is modern. I'd rather it be clear what is old and what is new, than trying to pretend the new is old. At least if it can be done well, and if the pictures are accurate, that seems to be the case.

Makes you wonder if people who came up with that have ever been inside Notre Dame.

Right? The stone vaulting above precludes letting any light in. And HUGE TREES placed where worshipers are supposed to sit? Wtf? How are you going to plant the trees without destroying everything else, including the catacombs below?

In this concept, the trees are on the upper "attic" level, not ground level.

How about whatever they do, wait 100 years before starting construction just to make sure the fashion of 2019 really is as timeless as it will need to be for the next 1000 years. There's no hurry. It took hundreds of years to build the original.

Judging by this thread, I might be the only one who likes this design so far.

It's pretty neat in my opinion to try to have a bit of our century represented in the notre dame for future generations.

I'm curious which one they will end up going for in the end.

> the only one who likes this design

I'm in the thumbs up camp for a glass ceiling.

Which my friends might find odd since I absolutely detest this abomination:

https://i.imgur.com/3U5IrQW.jpg

Which was lauded as adding a modern 'twist' to an old relic.

Hey, I'm from Toronto and I also hate the ROM's redesign. For one, it looks like sci-fi fungal growth, whereas the the Notre Dame glass design works in concert with the original. Second, the ROM's redesign somehow failed to take into account Toronto's weather. Icicles form along the exterior edges, often directly above the path into the ROM. Areas are sectioned off as "dangerous to walk under". Poor planning!

In good design, form follows function. I don't see the purpose in that angled glass structure other than trying to look different.

My god, that's amazing. For anyone else searching, it's the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Ontario_Museum

Yeah, now that photo perfectly summarises modern architecture taking the piss. It's all either "as cheap as we can get away with" or "look how {clever|edgy|controversial} I am". I hate most modern architecture as it's far too simplistic and sympathetic of nothing whatsoever in the surroundings. Which is not to say I think we should copy ancient styles.

This roof? Utterly beautiful, and a lovely way to get a close up view of the reconstructed spire. It'll look stunning at night. So I expect they'll choose something ugly instead. :)

> Yeah, now that photo perfectly summarises modern architecture taking the piss. It's all either "as cheap as we can get away with" or "look how {clever|edgy|controversial} I am".

This is true of pre-modern architecture, too; it's just that the distance of age makes cheap either gone and forgotten or “efficient” and clever/edgy/controversial—or, the also common in modernity, tendy followers of a successful instance of that—into memorable and iconic of a particular combination of time, place, and movement.

That doesn't seem at all true. Across millennia some basic tenets have remained - sense of proportion, symmetries etc. Even in the post industrial revolution, Victorian and Edwardian eras there was a retention of much of that. Even as they were discovering new construction methods and materials.

Victorians went with fussy and gothic, but even bleeding edge suspension bridges or curtain walled mills kept much of those classic curves, proportions and symmetries in the components, and in the styling. They seem easy on the human eye somehow, and manage to remain so. Even dirt cheap mass housing nods to what's around. Upto the war, as they were exploring minimalism and modernism, they still retained most of those tenets. We can look back, and whether victorian brick and steel bridge, brick 30s public building, or modernist it somehow looks right, while 99.99% of brutalist and other post war schools remain ugly as sin, and "just wrong" to nearly everyone. As they mostly did even when new. A tiny few manage to retain a little something and become the iconic examples.

Every era upto the war managed to nod to what surrounded too - to leave the street or cityscape looking "right" . Not the same, not a pastiche, but with some sympathy. Even the pre-war modernists managed to usually sit well in their surroundings, whereas currently they just take a dump on the carpet. What surrounds isn't looked at, or cared about. "look at my shit, you can't miss it", shit's everywhere. That was formerly an approach reserved for the odd mausoleum, palace or monument.

That thing is just shockingly ugly. I like the idea of blending together "old and new". But it has to _blend_. That 'abomination' is not really a blend. They just stuck together two incompatible pieces :P

edit: upon seeing it, it reminded me of the Jewish Museum Berlin. Which was designed to give a feeling of 'unrest' due to the holocaust. It turns out, the ROM and Jewish Museum Berlin are designed by the same architect. Not sure if he was the right person for the job there :P

I'm as conservative and traditional as they come... but it's got my vote. Looks cool. Who knows... maybe in 500 years there will another 'Hunchback of Notre Dame' kind of book but instead of the Quasimodo character having been driven mad by his job as the bell-ringer, it will be some character driven mad by his job as the bird-shit cleaner. Every time he sees a pigeon, he'd howl, "The birds! The birds!"

Wouldn't it turn it into a giant greenhouse?

I think that can be fixed by hanging some big galvanized air conditioning ducts from the ceiling.

There is no more humility. Nothing is holy anymore.

Why can we rebuild it the way it was (as much as possible) and make the fire (and therefore ourselves) an asterisk in the Cathedral’s history? Why must we etch ourselves into everything?

Want a glass cathedral? Go build one. Elsewhere.

Because it’s a “new world order” kind of project, not a religious one. See Celine Dion’s new brand, that sells death-designed clothes for babies, or anything new really: The goal is to change the world for the pleasure of change and loss of roots. The goal is to lose any attachment to any tradition, custom or legacy, and make every country the same mix of multicultural pot.

Upside is, you won’t need to travel in 2030, all countries will look the same.

FYI this is a far-right conspiracy theory, typically found among white supremacists. there is no evidence that a secret cabal is planning some kind of new world order or plotting to burn all the history books.

Also keep in mind this conspiracy theory is often followed by goalpost-changing along the lines of "well, obviously I didn't mean that they're all actually in a conspiracy, it's because they've been influence by [other conspiracy]", generally leading either to an infinite regress of adjusted claims, or talk about cultural Marxism claptrap and claims about how the Frankfurt School academics somehow nefariously orchestrated the next hundred years of global social change in the 1930s.

It can still happen without any central control. Popular culture changes. People generally don't respect churches as much as they used to. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's kids rebelling against their parents and wanting to stamp their mark on the world.

How can you talk about a "lack of respect" when more than a billion euros have been raised within a day to rebuild it?

The "way it was" is a 19th-century reimagination from people who obviously did not follow your advice.

Far more faithful to the original than a glass roof.

The guy who did the spire did add his own touch (like any cathedral that took several centuries to build). But with subtlety!

There is nothing subtle about another steel and glass monstrosity which litters modern architecture.

Instead of looking like a place of worship it will look like a fusion of a high rise condo and a nightclub.

The cathedral did not look in 2018 like it looked in 1260. it is fitting that it is different.

> Why can we rebuild it the way it was (as much as possible) and make the fire (and therefore ourselves) an asterisk in the Cathedral’s history? Why must we etch ourselves into everything?

Because we have no choice but to do so: rebuilding it as much as possible identical to how it was is as much writing ourselves into it as novelty is, not that simple stasis has been the consistent rule in past work, anyway.

Whether Church or State or otherwise, communities are evolving entities and the work they produce says something about where they were. Supposing one both can and should mask that is a weird combination of hubris and self-hatred.

That's not to say that restoration as much as practical to the status quo ante is always wrong, but instead that choosing that should be, and be recognized as, as much of an active statement about the present community as choosing novel elements as part of reconstruction is.

“Hubris and self hatred?” Can’t disagree on our hubris, but self-hatred? I can’t think of any time more narcisist than ourselves!

I want it rebuilt as close to the original because we are incapable of self-reflection.

Surely nothing we build can be devoid of ourselves, but why not leave behind subtlety?

The question is obviously rhetorical: Notre Dame is too big, too important an opportunity for some mediocre president and architect to leave their name in posterity.

Like you, some people complained when the Baron Haussmann transformed Paris or when Eiffel erected his Tower, or when the Louvre Pyramid was built. I see it as an opportunity to make it better. All buildings in Europe that have survived this long have evolved over the centuries. The Mezquita in Cordoba is also a great example with a mosque built around a cathedral.

Yeah, and a some of us are still annoyed that Mussolini razed a neighborhood and destroyed Rome just to build a modern boulevard.

Entertaining design, though I imagine it would end up just as hated as the Louvre pyramid.

pretty sure with the right treatment using something akin to a Dichroic filter as has already been done with glass to keep the appearance of being glass limited to street level viewers. Plus there are countless ways to limit reflectivity on the exterior surface to keep from taking away from the old architecture

The Louvre pyramid is hated? Every Parisian I know loves it

First time I hear that it is hated as well!

When the project was presented in 1984 it was universally hated by the French press. All lot of commentators said it would ruin and deface a national pride.

People have learned to love it - I personally think it's a fantastic addition to a unique site.

It’s only hated by angry online commenters in the US

Not everyone loves it, but it's certainly more liked than the Centre Pompidou. I personally don't mind either, they're both very interesting proposals, and they have a lot competition.

The trees are an interesting touch, but this seems like it misses out on the greatest active benefit of having a glass roof for a church: having natural sunlight fill the pews when services are held on nice days.

The problem with filling the interior of the cathedral with light is that you won't get the same effect from the stained glass windows and the candles. The great thing about this design is that it leaves the traditional experience of the interior of Notre Dame exactly the same while also offering a new space for contemplation.

The surviving inner structure would block the light anyway. The same structure that stopped the roof falling into the building too much.

Sunlight may be explicitly unwanted since strong light tends to cause a lot of things to decay more quickly and the church presumably has a lot of fragile antiques in it.

Drop the steel and use timber frame arches. Glass optional. Maybe partially stained with topics of great thinkers, artists, scientists of the last 500 years. Those rising us higher.

The glasses are OK. But I don't like the steel/metal frames, they don't match with the rest of the building architecture.

This roof and the view from the roof look stunning. A lot better than the old roof and spire.

Greenhouse reimagined as Notre Dame

There is definitely something very odd about French culture at the moment, as this has become a left vs. right political issue. As it was burning, I caught a reporter say that they'd overheard people in a case saying "good, let it burn," that "isn't France anymore." I thought this was odd, but has since proven to be emblematic of the prevailing opinion.

“We mustn’t say to ourselves, by dogmatism, that we must absolutely redo the cathedral as it was. We won’t decide to do something modern or something new just for the sake of it."

- French culture minister Franck Riester

Macron himself has decided to hold an architecture competition to redesign something "even more beautiful," which belongs to all of France/the world. Attempting to preserve the cathedral is now actually an explicitly conservative position.

“Before proclaiming ourselves builders, let us recognize first that we are inheritors. Notre-Dame de Paris does not belong to us. We are the first to see it burn: Our only duty is to restore her."

- Right-wing candidate for the Republican Party François-Xavier Bellamy

Now, I'm by no means a traditionalist or conservative, but there is something very off-putting about the attitude of those attempting to reimagine the structure. I think the thing that bothers me the most is that it's just another skin-deep tribalist gesture of identity, that we must visually reimagine a Catholic icon, because it's important that it belong to "everyone, everywhere." But that's precisely the problem, because it already DID. Notre Dame has been a global icon for hundreds and hundreds of years. I'm neither French nor Catholic, and have always been in complete awe of that structure. Who is looking for Angkor Wat to be reimagined in a modern style for the sake of global identity? Nobody, because Angkor Wat is a part of our global identity exactly as it is.

I had a friend share something on Facebook that absolutely blew my mind. It effectively stated that "if you think the Notre Dame burning is bad, you have no idea what Muslims have gone through by seeing ISIS destroying Assyrian artifacts." I thought that this was an absolutely insane position to take. Those Assyrian artifacts were priceless to all of humanity. I am exactly as devastated at the loss of Assyrian artifacts as I am with the burning of the Notre Dame, even more-so because it was done intentionally, but I can't help but feel that the people who are ostensibly attempting to take a globalist perspective are revealing to the rest of us that they have been internally nationalizing cultural achievements this whole time.

> Now, I'm by no means a traditionalist or conservative, but there is something very off-putting about the attitude of those attempting to reimagine the structure.

Notre-Dame has been "reimagined" repeatedly throughout history. For example, fron 1857 to 1864, the inside and outside were heavily refurbished, including many new decorations put in placee, entire sets of supports and walls replaced, and a brand new and taller spire designed from scratch to replace the previous onee. From 1991 to 2001, many of the exterior stone blocks, turrets, and gargoyles were replaced again, as industrial pollution had caused them to erode at an accelerated rate.

I'm aware, it's also been constructed and reconstructed over centuries. Don't be pedantic, you understand that I'm talking about the two general attitudes/positions being put forward. If the reconstruction internally used a stronger concrete or something while still trying to recapture the essence of the cathedral, that is not the same thing as wanting to reimagine it for the sake of dismantling its identity. And that's not catastrophizing or making assumptions on their behalf, that is literally what they are saying.

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