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Comment by kmlx | Hacker News Reader

an argument could be made that this was a once in a few generations chance to do something different, or at least change/add to the existing design. another argument is that the building saw many changes from ~1180 to today, so change was actually part of the history of the building.

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> to do something different

Entirely just to do something different? Or for any actual reason?

I mean things like: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/france-notre-dame-gree...

are just outright plain ugly due to many reasons and this is one of the nicer looking alternative proposals that I could find.

they cancelled the design competition and went with an identical reconstruction: https://www.thelocal.fr/20200710/macron-gives-blessing-to-re...

part of the reason was to have it ready for the olympics since a design competition would take a long time.

If there's one reason the French can't compete in the modern economy its because they are so painfully conservative in their culture. Elon Musk might be a cook with reactionary tendencies but he is a far more imaginary cook than anything the French can come up with. Did it really all end in 1848?

What ended in 1848? I don’t really get the relationship between these two unrelated things, you’re free to use whatever architectural style you want when building new houses and office buildings in France as far as I can tell.

By that standard other Europeans are even more conservative.. Germans rebuilt the Dresden Cathedral and palaces despite them being a complete ruin for decades. The Polish rebuilt Warsaw, Gdansk and I assume other cities almost entirely from scratch pretty much as replicas of their pre-war state.

What does that say about them?

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