Michael Kimmelman
Appearances
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
So there were different answers to that question. And at first, it wasn't clear what would happen. There were a lot of proposals to do something really crazy on the roof, to use essentially this calamity as an opportunity. Huh. Crazy like what? Well, the French prime minister hastily proposed that there be an architectural competition to reimagine the roof.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
That's an invitation for every wackadoodle proposal you can imagine. Architects salivate at the prospect of... Such a proposal. So circulating online pretty quickly were all sorts of things. Swimming pool, garden. Someone came up with the idea of like a giant carbon fiber gold leaf flame to replace the spire.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Yeah. It actually bore uncanny resemblance to the logo for Chicken Wings franchise in Colorado. And there were a lot of those things. But relatively soon, Coolerheads, including some prominent French architects, persuaded the French government to do the right thing, which was to restore the cathedral as it had been. And that became the mission.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
And Macron, the president, even while the building was still smoldering, promised that it would be restored in five years. which back then seemed not just a Hail Mary, it seemed completely crazy, impossible. To you too? Everybody. Yes, I thought it was nuts. I even told my editors there was absolutely no way this would happen in five years.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
20 years, we'll check in in 10 years, don't worry about this. Nothing really to see here. And it turns out I was wrong again. And here we are, five years later. The building has been reopened. It's on time, on budget. And it's incredible. It's a kind of a miracle.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Well, the president, Macron, assigned a general to run the operation, a man named Georgelin, and he ran it like a military operation. They cordoned off the cathedral. It meant you had essentially like a mystery in plain sight. You couldn't see what was happening on the other side of it. They shared what information they wanted. Otherwise, it was really impossible to get a look.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
I had wanted to embed myself there from the beginning to watch the process and to try to see what was going to happen day to day because I thought it would be an incredibly interesting project to follow. And they certainly weren't having any of that. They basically told you, no way. They were preoccupied, and I understand.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
And they surrounded the cathedral with this wall that told you information about Notre Dame and eventually showed pictures of some of the workers. But you could never see on the other side of it. You would occasionally see, you know, stuff going on in the cranes, obviously on the scaffolding. But it was really hard to know what was going on for a long time.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
And finally, after five years of begging and pleading and leaning really heavily on our wonderful colleague Aurelien Bredin in Paris, we got the word in June. We could come in one day next week. I didn't know what that meant, whether we had an hour or 45 minutes, whether we had two hours. We had that all day. I didn't know who we were seeing, but I packed my bags and flew to Paris. Right.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
I land in Paris. I meet Aurelien for breakfast nearby. We walk over the cathedral, and we're told— We have to strip naked and put on basically a hazmat suit. I'm sorry, what? Yeah, so I was a little taken aback and I asked a couple of times, like, naked naked? Like French naked? So I think what this probably was about was a holdover from the fact that there had been concerns about the lead.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Right, of the spire and the roof. And so they wanted to take extravagant cautionary steps to make sure that everyone came in and out, was not taking lead out from the cathedral. But by this point, That was a moot issue. But fine, I would have done anything. So I go through a security turnstile and enter this container village, invisible from the outside almost, but there it is.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
I mean, I remember as a boy going with my family, and we had come from the Soviet Union, where I was unable to find milk. I was probably eight. Paris, it turns out, has milk. It was cold, but I do remember going into the cathedral and feeling somehow warmed when I went in there. So that was my first impression. I guess it stuck with me in some way.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Hundreds of workers, a real beehive. We're... meeting the woman who's going to take us around. And we go to this construction elevator and rise up to the roof, which was incredible, seeing Paris in a way I'd never seen it, seeing the cathedral in a way I'd never seen it, seeing the workers there, who seemed, on the whole, remarkably happy.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
You know, construction sites are not usually happy places particularly. It's a lot of stress. And there was certainly a lot of stress and concern here at deadlines. But there was a really different atmosphere, a different vibe. What was it? I think for all of the stresses, there was a shared feeling of a mission. People were working on something that was bigger, longer-lasting than themselves.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
They would go home at night and, you know, they could say to their spouses, what did you do today? I worked on Notre Dame. What did you do? An impossible thing to match. Hard to top. And that's something of what I felt from talking to some of these workers as well. There was a collegiality. Some of them worked for competing firms. But here they would share hammers and help each other out.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
They were doing all sorts of stuff. They were laying down sheets of lead. They were erecting the spire. And most interestingly to me, they were rebuilding the rafters, this complex of beams.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
So I go through this, basically a hole in the roof, and enter this forest of reconstructed rafters. Very beautiful, these trusses that had been rebuilt. And, you know, it was providential. What do you mean? Well, before the fire... The cathedral was in disrepair. The roof was leaking. Some of that wood was rotting.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Repairs had started on the cathedral, but also there were some people who tried to document the cathedral. There were a couple of French architects who'd gone up into the rafters and the spire and recorded every detail of what there was down to the finest degree. Yeah.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
And there was a Belgian scholar who had used LIDAR to do a digital scan of the cathedral from all different sorts of points and gathered like a billion points of data. It was amazing, which gave the workers a map, effectively, of the cathedral down to the width of a pencil eraser. So the reconstruction could be extraordinarily faithful. What I learned from the workers was that each—
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
tree that had been cut down in forests across France had been specifically chosen to match the peculiarities of the beam that it would replace, the medieval beam, which had been faithfully studied before.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Exactly. And then the carpenters today, using the same sort of old hand tools... made sure that the contours of that beam, down to all sorts of peculiarities in the Middle Ages, were exactly the same. And this wasn't just for authenticity's sake.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Yeah, it's incredible, really, because you're reviving ancient techniques.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
This was because the previous beams had lasted for 800 years. Huh. And then they had tattooed back into it the medieval carpenter's original mark. And if there had been beams that had been reconstructed in the 19th century, they added those back too.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Yeah. It was especially extraordinary because not just was it faithful, but... It was something that the public will not see. So it wasn't done for tourists. It was about something else. It was devotional.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Yeah. Exactly, devotional to the techniques that dated back, really, thousands of years. One of the things that was going on here was to help to resuscitate what are basically artisanal, ancestral crafts and techniques. There's a group called the Compagnon du Devoir, which dates back to the 12th century, group of artisans, and there were more than a thousand applications
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
when the decision was made to restore the cathedral. People who wanted to participate in this project. And that was in some ways one of the most beautiful things about Notre Dame. One of the guys who was from that organization had said to me that it's a reminder of the dignity of labor and of craft. And I saw that in the workers themselves because it was not just reopening a tourist site.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Yeah, I think it does to millions and millions of people who have no religious connection to it. It was a place that people imagined they had to go to if they went to Paris. You didn't see Paris unless you went to Notre Dame.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
It was reviving a whole culture. It was sustaining something that had lasted for nearly a thousand years.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
So, you know, entering the cathedral was disorienting at first. First of all, it was a construction site still. So there were, you know, people moving heavy equipment and there's still a lot of scaffolding and tarp. But pretty quickly it became clear to me what had happened. I could see suddenly that the cathedral was spanking clean, bright.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
And I looked up and there had been all these famous images of the cathedral. the collapsed vaults, these giant black holes in the ceiling, and now they had been repaired. Now you had a new ceiling and it was spic and span and bright, and this kaleidoscopic light coming through these stained glass winches, which survived the fire. But what was also a kind of miracle,
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
was that that work in creating those digital maps before the fire allowed the people reconstructing it to even reproduce the sound of the cathedral. Wow. Because every material, every angle, every quality of the building could be reproduced now. One of the organists who works there spoke to me about this. A building like that is, it's a kind of organ pipe, he said.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
It's a volume that has a certain pitch and quality. He said, D major sounds really good in Notre Dame. And that is often what you experience when you come in. It's not just looking at things, it's hearing them, to feel you're surrounded by a particular sound.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
That's what I was sensing, that the soul of the building had come back, in a sense, which included not just the way it looked, but the way it felt and sounded.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Yeah, Michael, you know, I think at this point, after nearly a thousand years, no one really needs me to assess whether Notre Dame's a good building or not. Three stars. Yeah. Honestly, it's a little shocking at first to go in, and I think some people will experience this. You know, when the Sistine Chapel was cleaned some decades ago, people had gotten used to looking at all that Roman grime.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
And kind of they'd become attached to that quality of the Michelangelos covered with dirt and looking sort of dark and mysterious. Aged. Aged, yeah. And then grime was taken off and everyone thought it looked like a Superman comic. It was just so bright. Now, of course, people have become accustomed to that. I think there may be some of that kind of adjustment.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Yes, that's exactly correct. But I think it looked, obviously, really remarkable. And I did come away with something not just about the building, but a feeling— that the project itself represented something very moving. So few things nowadays seem sort of unimpeachable and just good. And that was the main takeaway I had about this project.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
It had not just gone well, but it seemed to be something that brought people together. It seemed to be something people could attribute larger meaning to.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
I remember very vividly where I was. I was on my bike, rushing to an appointment on the west side of Manhattan. My phone rang, and it was an editor here at the Times who sounded a little frantic and told me I had to rush back and write something because Notre Dame was burning. And I thought he was crazy.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Well, for starters, it tells us that this is not the moment when we let Notre Dame die, that we are capable of bringing it back to life. And that's a sign of hope. I mean, Notre Dame is not going to solve everyone's problems. France is still coming apart. Walk down the street, you die. still worry about whether there's going to be crime and homelessness. I don't want to overstate the case.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
But I do think Notre Dame reminds us that the places we build give us this sense of community. They give us a sense of each other. The coming together itself, which is what the cathedral is about, is a sign of hope for us. It's the thing that we wish we can do.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
It's our best selves. Right. Notre Dame is our best selves.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
If that's not a sign of human progress... Yeah, and you know, I met a lot of people, Parisians, some friends of mine, who had never really thought much about Notre Dame, or actually just found it an impediment on their way to work, all the crowds. And they found themselves crestfallen, shocked, really, by how they felt when it burned. And I think...
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
That was the realization for many people, that this building had a place in their own lives that they hadn't even understood before. It's a touchstone for our sense of our own changing, evolving lives, aging. And I think also for the passage of time in a larger sense over the centuries to which we are connected. And the building's resurrection preserves that connection.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
It allows us to think we can go back We haven't lost touch essentially with, not just with the past, but with ourselves.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Just before I left the cathedral, I was speaking with a woman who showed us around. And I asked her directly, are you Catholic? And she said, yes. So I said to her, what has it meant for you to be working on this project? And she struggled for like a minute to find the words. And then she wept. And I thought that said it all, really.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
That for her, this was also something that she would remember for the rest of her life. That she lived at this moment. For her, no doubt had religious meanings, but I'd like to think is the power of architecture and can sustain us at a time when we are divided and we sometimes lose hope. Maybe that was the original idea for the people who built the cathedral nearly a thousand years ago.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Because Notre Dame has a giant stone building. I didn't think it could burn down, and it sounded sort of inconceivable. It's like Everest. It doesn't burn down. But the pyramids do not burn down. There you go. And I said, I'm sorry to tell you this, but his name is also Michael. So I said, Michael, that doesn't make sense. He said, I think you just better look on your phone. Right.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
I remember standing there on the corner, just frozen, staring at this sight, which seemed inconceivable. And then Twitter was just full of Pray for Paris hashtag and everybody was suddenly fixated.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
It occurred to me at that moment, too, that's interesting. I mean, why? had the world stopped? Why did this building mean so much to so many different people? Not just people in France, but obviously all around the world. So I rushed back to my computer. I started making a few phone calls and trying to figure that out, trying to understand what the building had meant over time.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
And to see really what the building now represented to people, what this potential disaster—I mean, it was certainly a disaster, but there was the fear, of course, that the building would disappear, that this would be the moment after— almost 900 years that we were living at that moment when this building would go away.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Well, I think, Michael, you have to step back and say, what is the meaning of a building? I mean, for me, architecture is really the world we built and are building. I think a lot of people have talked about it as a kind of aesthetic thing, and that is one aspect of it for sure. And I think the conversation around architecture for a while sort of saw it as a branch of sculpture.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
You know, whether buildings were cool looking. They were fetishized, aestheticized. And there's definitely an aspect of that that's important in architecture. But... I've always felt that really architecture is much larger than that. Buildings are living things. They exist in our lives, in our neighborhoods, communities, cities. And they're there whether we choose to look at them or not.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
They have to be used. And so really they raise these questions of what do they say about us as a society? And in the case of Notre Dame, it's been speaking. It's meant things to people over generations, over centuries, for almost a thousand years.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Well, I think, you know, the building has had a lot of meanings over time. You, first of all, have to see where it sits geographically. It sits at the center of Paris on an island in the middle of the Seine River. And that island is where what came to be called Paris started.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Literally. It had been a prehistoric settlement and then was an ancient settlement. The Romans settled there. It was a Gallo-Roman town called Lutetia, occupied by the Parisi. I didn't know any of this. There you go. You're welcome. I hope it's true. And then when the church was there, there was original religious buildings and sanctuaries built on the island over centuries.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
It was invaded by Vikings. And then eventually in the 12th century, a bishop of Paris decided that they should build a Gothic cathedral there. And this was the new style. It was a little like the pyramids in the sense that these were buildings of an incredible scale and ambition and weirdness and majesty, complexity.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
So they tore down some of the old church buildings, which were on the east end of the island, and started erecting this building. And since then, that was in the 1160s, the building has remained the center of the city. It's essentially witnessed the growth of the city. It's been the sun around which the city has revolved. It's the place from which all distances in France are measured, literally.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
That's right. In a sense, everything circulates around it. But I think also it has witnessed a lot of important events in French history. Mary, Queen of Scots, was married there. Napoleon was coronated there. And when the revolution happened, you had, you know, the insurgence of the revolution, they ransacked Notre Dame. It was a symbol. They hated the church.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
They knocked off the heads of the Old Testament figures on the front who they thought were kings, and they melted down the bells and turned them into cannonballs and coins.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Yeah. By the time of Napoleon right after the revolution, The place was a wreck. It was a dump. It had been ruined during the revolution, but it was also falling apart.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
When Napoleon decided to have his coronation there, it was so bad that he had to get a couple of architects, like very high-level interior decorators, to basically hang a lot of tapestries to cover up all the mess behind it, like a stage set. And then that also caused Victor Hugo, the writer— to write a book about a hunchback bell ringer in which he... I've heard of it.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
He spends a chapter lamenting what had happened to Notre Dame, that this was said, what it said about France and what Notre Dame meant to the country.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Yeah. He wrote in, shall we say, ripe prose... and in long, voluptuous sentences, but I'll read you a couple. So first of all, he begins this chapter about Notre Dame. He says, the Church of Notre Dame de Paris is without doubt, even today, a sublime and majestic building.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
But however much it may have conserved its beauty as it has grown older, it is hard not to regret, not to feel indignation at the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and men have wrought simultaneously on this venerable monument. It's a call to arms. It's a call to arms, exactly. Which I think is interesting, Michael, because – That's the point.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
Notre Dame, for him, represented France. And so its recovery, its preservation, was about France's preservation, its heritage, its strength. Hugo had no... particular patience with the church, but he believed that the building itself meant a lot to the nation. And that book came at the same time as a movement was rising in France to preserve its heritage.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
And those two things led to the restoration of Notre Dame in the 19th century, to prevent its collapse, basically, and to restore it. And that was a key moment in the history of not just Notre Dame and Paris, but the whole idea of historic preservation globally.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
A palace of the people. That's right. He saw it as representing all sorts of romantic ideals about the people. about community, about glory. And that book helped inspire the renovation of the cathedral in the 19th century. It was brought back. We got the spire that then became famous on the Paris skyline. Hugo's book also made it more of an attraction.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
People wanted to come to Paris to see the building. Eventually, Disney wanted to make movies about it. People from all over the world came. More of them then went to see the Eiffel Tower in Paris. More of them then went to visit the St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. And in that sense, it really did become truly a palace of the people. And so what did this fire say about us, about this moment?
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
That the horror of it was that our moment would be the moment when this building across this great arc of history would disappear. What did that say about how we had cared for it? And even the fact that it was on fire. was clearly an indication that we'd been derelict. It was a fire that never needed to happen. And it wasn't a great world war that had destroyed other cathedrals.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
It was a guy who probably left a cigarette butt lighted in the rafters. And then somebody else who went to the wrong place to check out why there was an alarm. It seemed so banal. And it seemed like it said something about us in this moment.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
It was really severe. It started in the rafters, and the rafters are made out of oak, wood, and spread to the spire, which is made out of wood, too, and lead.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
I was extremely wrong. And it wasn't just the roof was on fire and the spire was collapsing. It was a very dangerous and complex thing for the firemen to try to put this fire out. They couldn't dump water from above. The cathedral might collapse. It was a building they didn't want to use powerful hoses in. They had to go inside and try to put it out.
The Daily
Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes
There was a point at which they went into the Bell's Towers to prevent them from collapsing. If they had, the whole building would have gone down. So what started as a fire start by a cigarette butt was really a kind of existential crisis for Notre Dame and for the world.