The Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris reopened to the public on Dec. 8 for the first time since April 2019, when a fire destroyed its roof and spire and filled its interior with ash, lead dust and charred wood. A five-year restoration project stabilized its walls, rebuilt the roof and spire, and cleaned the interior, including the famous stained-glass windows, statues and murals. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign architecture professor Kathryn Holliday is the inaugural Randall J. Biallas Professor of Historic Preservation and American Architectural History, and an architecture and landscape historian with interdisciplinary training in architecture, art history, environmental studies and museum work. Her work in historic preservation examines how buildings and landscapes relate to stories of the world around us. She talked with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel about the Notre-Dame restoration.
How has Notre-Dame and its architecture evolved over its history, and how does that relate to how we view the cathedral?
The Cathedral of Notre-Dame traces its beginnings to the middle of the 12th century and was continually expanded and rebuilt through the middle of the 19th century. Much of what we consider today to be memorable and iconic about the cathedral actually was invented in the 1850s by the architect Eugène Emanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who oversaw a massive building campaign that was intended to restore and finally finish the cathedral. Viollet-le-Duc was one of the first modern era architects to delve into what we consider to be historic preservation, and his perspective was, and remains, controversial. He believed that a preservationist should imagine what a building might be when completely finished, even if that meant adding things to the building that had never been there before.
As a result, the openwork spire, the gargoyles and the sculptural figures along the roof lines were added under Viollet-le-Duc’s supervision, intended to make the building look more Gothic, and therefore more like what it should have been if it had been completed during the Gothic period. That building campaign in the middle of the 19th century captured the imagination of the Parisian public, as did Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” (1831), which had partially inspired some of Viollet-le-Duc’s thinking about the cathedral’s restoration.
Those interested in a detailed timeline of the cathedral’s construction across 800 years can consult the text of the exhibition the J. Paul Getty Museum assembled after the 2019 fire here: https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/notre_dame/downloads/notre_dame_gallery_text.pdf
When restoring a building of such significance, how are decisions made about what to preserve? What do those decisions tell us about what we value?
The restoration of a building like the Cathedral of Notre-Dame is a massive collaborative process that has to begin with an understanding of what the building means to people and how its physical form embodies that meaning. Many early proposals called for making creative but substantial changes, like the proposal to replace the lead sheathed roof with a canopy of glass. Debates over what is significant — a term used in historic preservation to denote what makes a building or place meaningful — guide us toward decisions about what must be kept intact so that we remain connected to the feeling, mood and history of a place.
Is the cathedral still Notre-Dame if we give it a glass roof and steel columns? The restoration team, with tremendous public input, decided not. That same process informs every restoration project, from the smallest to the largest. At the heart of the process is a consideration of what the most significant aspects of a building are and how their integrity can be maintained during a complex restoration process. In the end, we still want to be able to recognize that landmark building or place as continuing to tell its story.
How do our expectations about Notre-Dame affect how we view the cathedral after the renovation?
The Cathedral of Notre-Dame is an interesting case, as it has come to be a secular symbol for the city of Paris itself more than a symbol of the Catholic Church. And Paris itself is an interesting city in the way it completely rebuilt itself during the 19th century, modernizing the old medieval city by bulldozing entire quarters, replacing them with broad, straight boulevards and modern monuments like train stations, the grand Palais Garnier opera house and dozens of others. Notre-Dame thus represents the survival of the old medieval Paris amidst the new.
At the same time, that story is complicated, as Notre-Dame itself was modernized and changed in the 1850s as well to become even more Gothic feeling than it had been. All of this to say that Notre-Dame is intended to feel old, connecting us to a long ago past embodied directly in the middle of the city. I have not yet visited the restored cathedral, but the news coverage shows it to be bright, light and clean in a way that confounds our typical sense of what is “old” and our sense of the brooding, melancholy, spiritual light of traditional Gothic cathedrals. It will be interesting to see how the cathedral continues to evolve after its restoration.
How can the restoration of Notre-Dame affect how we look at our own communities and the buildings that are important to us?
Every community, no matter how small, has a “Notre-Dame” of its own — a movie theater, school, church, diner, department store, city hall, house, park, playground, swimming hole or some other place that embodies the meaning of a community. Notre-Dame was restored because the world recognizes it as a symbol of Paris and because resources from government, business and private citizens quickly coalesced to pay for the project. Small communities can be inspired to take their own actions to coalesce around the places important for defining their own sense of identity and come together to take action. There are resources to restore buildings and places and experts — architects, historians and non-profits — to help. The first step is for a community to care enough to unite and advocate for places they care about.