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Great take. Also good to remember that a Temple of Jupiter once stood where Notre Dame is. After that was destroyed, a basillica stood there, and then a Romanes
by freehunter 8y ago
Great take. Also good to remember that a Temple of Jupiter once stood where Notre Dame is. After that was destroyed, a basillica stood there, and then a Romanesque cathedral. That last one, which was nearly 700 years old, was torn down to build the Gothic style Notre Dame.
The people who built Notre Dame tore down what to them would have been ancient history. Those other buildings were hundreds of years old by the time Notre Dame was built. 800 years ago, Notre Dame was the change that destroyed a 700 year old historical building. And the new construction was built in a super-modern style. They didn't try to make it look like the old building they tore down, they built it with the most modern techniques in a super trendy style.
Much like death and rebirth are cornerstones of the Christian religion that Notre Dame represents, death and rebirth are fundamental to Notre Dame itself.
- IIAOPSW 8y agoNotre Dame Morte. Viva le Notre Dame.
- baud147258 8y ago> Notre Dame est morte. Vive Notre Dame. FTFY
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoWhile I totally agree with your sentiment, I'm not sure how I'd feel about tearing the whole thing down and building something brand new in its place. Interesting to ponder why that is.
- johnchristopher 8y agoMaybe because you suspect that this brand new something wouldn't necessarily be built to travel through centuries.
- basch 8y agoThats sort of how I feel about it being done in 5 years. Take your time, make it a big deal, its ok if you spend a lifetime on it. People who visit will get to say they saw it being built, while it was under construction. When it is finally unveiled at the end the story can be "this was xxxx years in the works."
- crististm 8y agoI guess this is because you need to have a reason to build the thing, a reason congruent with the aspirations and the will of the people living there
- GuiA 8y agoVictor Hugo did a great job at reviving interest for the cathedral with his book. If it hadn’t been for him, it is entirely possible it would have been destroyed instead of restored in the mid 1800s, and you wouldn’t care much about it :)
- worldsayshi 8y agoThere's an interesting point here somewhere about how a story being of greater cultural impact than the icon that it choose to portray. And yet most people would probably say that the icon itself, the cathedral, is of much greater cultural significance than the story. Or perhaps the two can't really be separated.
- johnchristopher 8y agoOn that note, around that time (during the revolutionary period, 1793), Liège (Belgium) disassembled their cathedral brick by brick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lambert%27s_Cathedral,_Li%C3%A8ge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lambert%27s_Cathedral,_L... A 3D rendering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTkk2P0KabA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTkk2P0KabA A picture, google image has more, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sint-Lambertuskathedraal_Curtius.jpg?uselang=fr https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sint-Lambertuskathed... And as you point it out we don't think much about it these days (for better or worst).
- baud147258 8y agoThat link is broken https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/Sint-Lambertuskathedraal_Curtius.jpg/800px-Sint-Lambertuskathedraal_Curtius.jpgimg.XnM-T2426wQ https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/Si... I think it's this one: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/Sint-Lambertuskathedraal_Curtius.jpg/800px-Sint-Lambertuskathedraal_Curtius.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/Si...
- johnchristopher 8y agoThanks, I tried to be clever. The post now links to the media page instead of the picture.
- zip1234 8y agoIn Rome I can think of one church (San Clemente Basilica) that was built on top of a pagan temple, which then had another church built on top of it, which then had the current church built on top of it. You can in fact tour all levels of it. Much of ancient Rome lies at a lower level than the current city, so those buildings are now basements or buried. In many cases that is what happened, not wholesale knocking down of the old buildings.
- misiti3780 8y agoThat church is pretty cool and and pretty hidden, up on the hill behind the colosseum right ?
- zip1234 8y agoYes, it is very close but still not completely overwhelmed with tourists as the Colosseum is.
- musingsole 8y agoI've heard of buildings built on top of others before. Is it commonly because the buildings have actually sunk into the ground or are they somehow pushed?
- dmitriid 8y agoIt’s apparently called sediment accumulation. If you can suffer through Quora, some answers there: - https://www.quora.com/How-were-ancient-cities-built-on-top-of-older-ones/answer/Dimitra-Triantafyllidou https://www.quora.com/How-were-ancient-cities-built-on-top-o... - https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-ground-level-of-Ancient-Rome-so-much-lower-than-the-modern-ground-level/answer/Guus-Arnouts https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-ground-level-of-Ancient-Rom...
- iguy 8y agoHere's a great blog post about San Clemente https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/ https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/ (in which Freud battles his vertigo...)
- Haga 8y agoAs we grow older we realize that nothing lasts forever but change. Gone is your childhood home, gone your school, gone the people who defined it. it's nice to have something around that seemingly lasts forever like the earth and sky. Makes us feel home, when home is long lost too time.
- village-idiot 8y agoPresumably this iteration of Notre Dame was built by old men. Something must have changed at the societal level to make tearing down a 700 year old cathedral to make a new one possible in the 13th century, but seem unconscionable in the 21st.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoA vast development in building capabilities and craft I think is the answer. I don't think we have more crafting capabilities now when it comes to architecture, we can build bigger, higher, etc.. I don't think we can build with a greater sense of human devotion to ones craft and it's use to glorify God. Buildings now show incredible material science, technological development; but rarely the decades of learning of human craft directly applied to materials. I think if we were going from rough-hewn to well-faced stonework, opaque windows or simple slits to translucent radiant glasswork, from flat ceilings to intricate vaulting, etc.. that we too would make that leap. We are so much richer, we can afford to keep old stuff, hoard it even, and still have resources a'plenty to keep warm, feed everyone, and build glorious buildings.
- aswanson 8y agoBeen having those thoughts revisiting my old elementary school with my kid. Every teacher and staff member when I went there is gone, but in my memory there is a snapshot of that part of my life...frozen in time. Comparing that snapshot in time & space to what it is now is jarring. Nothing is permanent but change.
- naravara 8y ago>Gone is your childhood home, gone your school, gone the people who defined it. it's nice to have something around that seemingly lasts forever like the earth and sky. Makes us feel home, when home is long lost to time. What makes monuments like Notre Dame or the pyramids special is that they DO imbue this sense of continuity. Everything else in our lives comes and goes, but a few things we as a society come together collectively to say "This is special and worth preserving." There is a special feeling of connection one gets from that sense of unity across time. These are the things that give us a sense of shared history and a shared future destiny. And it has the effect of simultaneously making you feel individually small and insignificant, but also important and part of something grand. The first time I visited Paris I remember one of my most dominant thoughts was that nothing like this will ever be built again. There is so much in the art and architecture that, by modern standards, would be deemed wasteful and extravagant and a suboptimal use of resources. We don't value aesthetics in the same way. So when these things go, they're gone forever. Even if remade they will only ever be an imitation of a way of thinking and a way of life that has gone extinct. They won't even serve to remind us of those old ways because the gestalt you get from layering generations of use and the peculiar artifacts of the material culture that created it will be gone. That's why people mourn. It's not just about the building, but the fact that the building anchors them to a sense of tradition and continuity. And it's not the first time these things happened. It was mentioned that before it was a Christian church it was a temple to Jupiter in that location. Removing the old pagan monuments was a conscious effort to FORCE just such a break from the past. To say the old pagan ways are over and to sever any sense of continuity with that old culture and their old Gods. I'm sure it was just as troubling or traumatic then too. We still have some collected myths and stories from the Romans and the Norse and so on, but a lot of these were written by Christian converts who were sad that the stories they heard on their grandparents' knees were going to disappear. They may have converted, but they felt like this was something important that needed to be preserved.
- Dirlewanger 8y agoI think part of it would be intent. I don't know that much about its creation, but I'm guessing the Notre Dame was planned out to survive a long time, much longer than a wooden structure of similar size. It was also built as a place of worship and of similar religious use. It wasn't something that wasn't going to be discarded if it wasn't "performing well". I say all of this in contrast to e.g. tearing down the Notre Dame and putting up some real estate development that rents out stalls to merchants. Say the economy takes a hit and the owners start considering selling the land, only for the structure to be torn down again. My point is that it'd be a tragic misuse if the structure fell into the hands of those solely seeking a profit from the structure/land.
- worldsayshi 8y agoI think there's a lot to say about this. I feel that today's Zeitgeist doesn't favour radical renewal. It feels like it's quite anxious and conservative as a whole. We're unsure about the future and what direction to go as a species. And as often before we look for comfort in our ancestors.
- jakecopp 8y agoI find this a fascinating point. In my understanding it's in complete contrast to the modernist architectural movement with its ideals of urban renewal. Anyone have any other thoughts on this current Zeitgeist?
- mindcrime 8y agoPersonally, I think a lot of the current Zeitgeist is rooted in what Alvin Toffler called Future Shock[1]. Given that he wrote his book in the late 60's / early 70's, and considering how much technological change in particular has accelerated since then, I do believe that most of us are walking about in a "future shock" state. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
- petre 8y agoIt hasn't burned to the ground or suffered structural damage to the walls, so no one in their right mind is going to tear the whole thing down. They'll restore it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cm2187 8y agoSo you are suggesting we replace the site with a concrete floor and a glass tower?
- cmurf 8y agoIt seems a common theme with many big old churches. The York Minster is built on top of multiple churches. It took 250 years to build.
- charlescearl 8y agoI’m also reminded of the Temple of David in Jerusalem or the more recent rebuilding of the shrines in Timbuktu. Permanence is about constant rebirth.
- basch 8y agoI also think there is a really cool opportunity here to allow people to compete and donate to history. If you look at the last major restoration "Once the project was approved, Viollet-le-Duc made drawings and photographs of the existing decorative elements; then they were removed and a stream of sculptors began making new statues of saints, gargoyles, chimeras and other architectural elements in a workshop he established, working from his drawings and photographs of similar works in other cathedrals of the same period." "Other craftsmen made stained glass windows in Gothic grisaille patterns designed by Viollet-le-Duc to replace the destroyed medieval windows in the chapels of the ground floor of the nave of the cathedral." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Viollet-le-Duc#Notre-Dame_de_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Viollet-le-Duc#Not... Artists across France should be engaged to submit works with the promise that effort will be made to preserve them for centuries, if their work is chosen for inclusion. Even the stuff that doesnt make the cut could end up somewhere.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago>in a super trendy style // This suggests it was supposed to be fashionable. But fashion in the modern world is "trendy" we build in an attempt to court popularity. I'd imagine Notre-Dame adopted the style it did as part of the linear architectural development, constrained by Church tradition, and needs, and liberated by new building techniques. Not built for fashion, but for longevity and utility as a place of Worship. Perhaps that's why it centred around a traditional (in C11) Romanesque cruciform plan with tower. Indeed the initial build - I gather - didn't include the flying buttresses that enable the "opening" of the walls to far more glass usage. IMO Notre-Dame de Paris represents something of a pinnacle of Church architecture inasmuch as we don't devote that much manpower or that many resources to buildings nowadays. That's right morally, I think, but means short of Gaudi's ongoing build such opulent Church architecture is firmly fixed in the past for Europe at least(?). It would be fascinating to see a Gothic cathedral built in modern Europe, do we even have the craftsmen to accomplish it? TL;DR I'm not convinced.
- justinator 8y agoThe design was absolutely used to attract tourists, and each cathedral was competing with all the others for attendence. That's why they were constantly updated, built upon, and in some cases: demolished to start again. Except those tourists were called, "pilgrims". The money they paid to enter the building was what was used to fund the cathedral itself. See also, the Holy relics, like the Crown of Thorns. It's like a roadside attraction, except there's the hope of escape from earthly damnation and enter into everlasting peace in Heaven. Which I mean, that's a nice bonus. Such promises were made to those who worked on and/or financed the cathedral's building. That whole system isn't in play anymore (The Catholic Church just doesn't have that power, or Monopoly over things like intellectual property like books and people who can read those books) and places like Notre Dame are in serious disrepair (before the fire). That's sort of the real tragedy: this fire probably could have been avoided if the money was there to spend.
- iguy 8y agoI believe that the cathedral is owned & maintained by the French state, not by the church. Whether they scrimp on the cost of repairs I don't know; it certainly always looked to be in quite good shape to me.
- mirimir 8y agoHuh. So I wonder if some stone from the Temple of Jupiter got recycled into that basillica. And then into that Romanesque cathedral. And finally into Notre Dame. It seems pretty likely, from what I remember reading about other cathedrals. This rebuilding would be a great opportunity to document that.