On Topic Discussion The Tragedy of Notre Dame

[belamyi]

Christians need spires to point their prayers to god.

That why Viollet-le-Duc added that that skinny little spire which burnt up last week.

He didn't add, he restored, that is, replaced.

 

[rareboy]

The bee hives housed on the roof of the sacristy survived.

Fortunately for them, (not so much the stone vaulted ceiling) the roof above fell inward.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/19/euro...d87SCIW3C8Hbtqvtt64ReuPxzhdP2ulc4A_xcjVUET9Dc

 

[Zeno Lorea]

Holy crap!

 

[themostke]

Omg so horribale

 

[Zeno Lorea]

^^^ Spires are occasional features on a gothic bell towers notably on Cologne, Chartres, and St. Andre.

However, Reims, Amiens, Laon, Bourges, York, Canterbury, Westminster, don't have them either. The Basilica of St. Denis used to have one, but it was removed.

And it's worth pointing out that the ones in Cologne were added in 1880, so even later than on Notre Dame, while the church itself was started in 1248, so earlier than Paris.

On the other hand, the main reason for a gothic cathedral not to have a spire is probably because it was never finished. Few gothic cathedrals were ever finished, because building them took centuries while fashions changed, cities went through booms and busts, borders of countries and dioceses were moved and sometimes the area even abandoned catholicism.

 

[LeicsDom]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-47998294/notre-dame-fire-how-gamers-are-getting-inside-the-cathedral

Notre-Dame fire: How gamers are getting 'inside' the cathedral

Fascinating how modern technology is allowing people to revisit the fire damaged cathedral

 

[rareboy]

Interesting that everyone wants to put a glass roof on Notre Dame.

Any favourites?

I would point out that the one that they say would allow light down into the cathedral wouldn't. The ceiling is stone vaults.

https://mymodernmet.com/notre-dame-...Eved1FjAo1iFkJyOw-rNqRo3uFaFLvJE0k60S5MQ2pEm4

 

[Latimer]

Appalling idea. Foster's glass-roofed courtyard in the British Museum is awful. Nicely detailed, but do you really want to be in that space? I never have. His proposed addition and re-fashioning of the NY Public Library was very badly conceived and fortunately--after much protest--rejected. These architects seem to not understand that one of the glories of the cathedral is the vaulting system. Re-build it as it was, and don't waste our time attempting to convince us that you can do better. You can't.

 

[Alistair]

I liked the stained glass roof. It would look grand in the city of Lights. But I doubt Parisians would appreciate it, with what was thought of the pyramid at Le Louvre.

 

[Latimer]

^
Let me try again:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/rebuilding-notre-dame-not-so-fast-11556744484

Michael Lewis is so right about Chartres. Very disappointing now--depressing actually. I won't return.

 

[belamyi]

I liked the stained glass roof. It would look grand in the city of Lights. But I doubt Parisians would appreciate it, with what was thought of the pyramid at Le Louvre.

Like the little jungle they had before looked any better,

and was "truer" to the original state lol:

The same with Viollet's spire: the roof was just a plain roof, no great loss in itself, and didn't lend any additional appeal to the whole building: the replacement should be just as flat as the one that got burnt, but the idea of a plain (just as the previous one) glass roof wouldn't be misplaced in an architecture promoting glass and light:

AS for the spire, a glass version would walk along the kitsch way opened by Viollet's.

 

[Zeno Lorea]

He didn't add, he restored, that is, replaced.

I disagree. The old spire was taken down in 1786 as it had become a safety hazard. Viollet-le-Duc added his spire over 75 years later. I think most people expect "replace" to imply some degree of continuity. When the new spire was put up, no living Parisian remembered the old one.

 

[belamyi]

I disagree. The old spire was taken down in 1786 as it had become a safety hazard. Viollet-le-Duc added his spire over 75 years later. I think most people expect "replace" to imply some degree of continuity. When the new spire was put up, no living Parisian remembered the old one.

That's what I said: it was replaced; decades later, but replaced: that's your "degree of continuity" It would have been "added" if there had NEVER been any spire up there before, which is what I thought, as a kid, when I first learnt about all that.

When the new spire was put up, no living Parisian remembered the old one.

How can be so sure about that, where you living among Parisians when Viollet put his erection on old Notre-Dame? Still, surely there where living Parisians who knew about it, just like they knew about Marie Antoinette, Queen of France when the old spire was dismantled


But, obviously, you can still choose to persevere in disagreeing because, hey, no fact or reasoning has the force and right to counter one's beliefs... especially when those facts and reasoning are forwarded in a tone that one may not find pleasant: that is the ultimate "reason" one has to ignore whatever facts or logic do not fit in one's set of beliefs.

 

[NotHardUp1]

Appalling idea. Foster's glass-roofed courtyard in the British Museum is awful. Nicely detailed, but do you really want to be in that space? I never have. His proposed addition and re-fashioning of the NY Public Library was very badly conceived and fortunately--after much protest--rejected. These architects seem to not understand that one of the glories of the cathedral is the vaulting system. Re-build it as it was, and don't waste our time attempting to convince us that you can do better. You can't.

Although I would first stay that it is the right of the French to chose modernity over tradition, I believe they will chose more wisely and express modernity in some new venue and restore that which nature has decimated for the time being.

If they chose to return to some earlier incarnation of the landmark, then that would be much more acceptable, but neither would be bad. I could even be content with the ruin being cleaned up and left as a perpetual park and memorial sort of affair, but I suspect too much French pride is at stake for that to ba allowed, and I can understand that. The architecture of the great cathedrals is stunning and rightly praised.

I've always thought of the collapsed roofs of the over-reaching cathedrals when I think of them. How daunting that must have been, after so long in the making, but how necessary in the evolution of the understanding of the forces of stress, just like the flight failures of various aircraft.

I'm content that we had Notre Dame survive into the modern era and fully know it visually. I've been in rebuilt historic places before, and you don't get the same aura of history but you do get the accurate visual perception. It will be so with the cathedral, I think.

 

[belamyi]

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[belamyi]

^ They didn't work very hard on the designs and renderings did they.

 

[belamyi]

 

[Alistair]

^ the spire should be a mobile cellular tower

 

[Kahaih]

^ They didn't work very hard on the designs and renderings did they.

Still, none of them as hideous as the flying buttresses. They are no more attractive than an old plank bracing a dilapidating barn.

Each standing as a monument to shoddy design.

 

[belamyi]

^ Right? on the brink of WWIII or whatever, and people all wrought up and "tragic" over a piece of stony Medieval Rambaldi work.