Photo: Patrick Zachmann/Magnum Photos.
The real miracle: Reconstructing the intricate wood frame of Notre Dame’s roof.
When the unthinkable happens to a beloved cultural icon, what’s next? In the days and weeks after the great fire of Notre Dame Cathedral broke hearts around the world, plans began to take shape.
Joshua Hammer writes at GQ, “Some time after six in the evening on April 15, 2019, Rémi Fromont was sitting at the Brasserie Saint-Malo, a lively café in Montparnasse, Paris, when his phone rang.
“ ‘Notre-Dame is on fire,’ ” said a friend on the other end of the line. … Fromont leapt out of his chair, got on his bike, and pedaled north toward the cathedral. …
“About an hour after his arrival, Fromont, with thousands of Parisians at the scene and millions watching around the world, looked on as the 750-ton spire, made of 1,230 oak beams, blazed, teetered, snapped like a matchstick, and crashed through the roof. Spectators broke into tears of disbelief and horror. …
“The day after the fire, French president Emmanuel Macron made a promise: Notre-Dame would rise again in the next five years. …
“None of the many priceless paintings, sculptures, and windows that filled the church’s interior — though they were stained by smoke and singed by fire — had been wrecked beyond repair. …
“The roof frame was a different story. Known in French as the charpente, it was an ingenious assemblage of triangular-shaped trusses, each one consisting of horizontal and vertical beams and diagonal rafters designed to support the heavy roof cover and distribute the weight over the walls beneath it. Built from thousands of pieces of wood and assembled without nails, it was a singular achievement, one of the oldest surviving all-wood structures in the world. …
“During World War I, German artillery shells had reduced the cathedral in Reims, another Gothic masterpiece, to charred wood and rubble. In 1919, the architect Henri Deneux launched the restoration, reconstructing the church’s roof with reinforced concrete, a decision that was controversial at the time.
“Fromont had not warmed to Deneux’s approach. He believed that the roof’s charpente could be rebuilt exactly as the medieval carpenters had done it. The approach was not without risks — Fromont had told me, ‘Wood burns. I’m not going to say the opposite’ — but certain measures could be put into place to mitigate its vulnerability. …
“The roof’s charpente was perhaps [Notre Dame’s medieval woodworkers’] greatest creation. Yet Fromont told me that, until recently, it had never been the subject of serious scholarly study. …
“In 2012, Fromont, then a 35-year-old scholar at Paris’s École de Chaillot, decided to address that absence. For his advanced degree, Fromont proposed spending a year surveying every inch of the charpente. When they were at last granted permission, he and his partner on the project, Cédric Trentesaux, entered the cathedral’s south transept and climbed a winding staircase into the triangular south gable. There they squeezed through an aperture and entered a medieval realm barely visited in over 800 years. …
“The two men emerged from the project with the most extensive blueprint of the 800-year-old structure that had ever been created. ‘It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough,’ Fromont said. …
“There was some skepticism that the charpente could be re-created in its original glory, but Fromont found an ally in François Calame, France’s leading apostle of traditional carpentry. In the early 1990s, as a young carpenter, Calame had visited Maramures‚ a remote region in western Romania. Isolated from a fast-changing world during Nicolae Ceausescu’s 24-year dictatorship, artisans there had kept the old ways of carpentry alive.
“Like in Romania, traditional French axmen used hand tools: the hache de grossière, a long-handled, narrow-bladed axe used to remove large amounts of wood, and the doloire, a broad-bladed, short-handled axe designed for precision chipping following the grain of the wood. It’s slow and physical work: Squaring lumber by hand can take much more time than doing it with buzz saws. For that reason, by the 20th century, axes had all but disappeared as a construction tool. Yet their proponents extol the end result: more pliable, stronger beams, and imperfections that reflect the extensive labor and love of craft. ‘This is a kind of magical work because you feel the material,’ Fromont told me. ‘You smell it and touch it.’ ”
Read what happened next in Paris. The long and fascinating article is at GQ, here. No firewall.
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