Restoring Notre Dame de Paris

I remember exactly where I was when the fire happened. I was sitting at lunch with several of my classmates. I was in Hager Hall in Math for Architecture. We were watching one of the TVs that had the news on and we saw the fire and that Notre Dame was burning. We all like were just glued to the TV. I don't think I ever took my eyes off my phone the rest of the day until the fire was put out. I just remember it being a very emotionally stressful thing to watch. I think it's something that almost everyone in the world could connect on. There are very few monuments of that scale that can impact you on such an emotional level. You could definitely tell that a lot of the architecture students, architecture faculty, and just folks involved with the School of Architecture saw it as the death of a building. A lot of us remember when it initially burned down and how we felt about that. And that kind of in tandem with a presentation that was given by the head architects of the restoration about a year ago prompted this research idea. I was drawing, thinking about specifically how they talked about the wood sourcing process and going out to this forest that Louis XIV planted and using those trees that had been planted specifically for this purpose and they were going to use those trees to rebuild the roof. And I was like, that's so interesting and wouldn't it be so amazing to see that forest or understand how they sourced the stones and how they went about the material construction and who's all involved in the project. And it sort of just evolved to the point that I said, wait a minute, what if we went to France? We took a team of students and professors to Paris to look at the restoration process of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. So we went to just be on site, experience it, take a lot of photos, do on-site documentation. You can learn so much from books and that is incredibly important, but being in the place, hearing the sounds, understanding how the people work, it helps you understand the buildings and it helps you understand the place. It hadn't burnt down, you'd never see it from this vantage point because they wouldn't have this. This point of view is very impressive and then the detailing of the little spirals that makes up the flying buttresses is very interesting. Frankly, I'm amazed that we're able to get this close to the structure in general regardless of the restoration. It's fabulous that we're able to see it up close because there's so many different details. I didn't necessarily expect to have so close to be able to really look at for an extended period of time. Part of our deeper dive into the specifics of what is actually going into the restoration physically, we're very interested in the material sourcing. So what we're doing here is looking at the quarry where they're sourcing the new stone. But what we learned yesterday from Philippe, which was very interesting actually, that he was not interested in getting the exact stone from the exact quarry that built the original cathedral because it actually didn't match the colour correctly. So he instead found this quarry instead and sourcing the stone to be more visually accurate to the cathedral instead of being the exact place of origin. It's something that I think like civil engineering, you fall in love with without totally realizing why. Our tour guide on site talked a lot about warmth, the warmth of the quarry and the place that he sort of felt home in. And for whatever reason, it was just another place where I felt home, where I felt like I understood what was going on and where I felt like I had a lot to give as the structural engineer on this trip. So that's why I was excited to be there. Every building has a different story. Some keep adding on and they change as we can see with the Cathedral of Notre Dame. To be a part of that story is something that I would say has been the biggest impact of this trip. We are going to be written in history with the building and people will be walking into the cathedral and seeing these new stones that we have seen up close. We've seen where they come from, we've seen the birthplace of its renovation. So being able to learn from buildings up close is something that I cherish. So it is definitely a unique environment here that lends such a particular focus to reverence of the past and the ability to learn from buildings that are centuries old.