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Episode: Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes

Author: The New York Times
Duration: 00:38:14

Episode Shownotes

On Sunday, after a fire that many feared would destroy it, and a swift renovation that defied all predictions, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame reopened to the public.Michael Kimmelman, the chief architecture critic at The Times, tells the story of the miracle on the Seine.Guest: Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic of

The New York Times and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway.Background reading: Critic’s Notebook: Notre-Dame’s astonishing rebirth from the ashes.The rebuilding took about 250 companies, 2,000 workers, about $900 million, a tight deadline and a lot of national pride.See photos from the reopening.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Summary

In 'Notre-Dame Rises From the Ashes', Michael Kimmelman explores the emotional aftermath and cultural significance of the Notre-Dame fire. He reflects on the intense global reaction, highlighting the cathedral as a symbol of French identity and shared humanity. The rapid restoration effort, characterized by collective pride and meticulous craftsmanship, demonstrates architectural resilience. Despite initial doubts about the feasibility of restoration, the reopening of Notre-Dame signifies a triumph over adversity and a rekindling of hope, reinforcing the cathedral's enduring legacy in French culture.

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Full Transcript

00:00:12 Speaker_08
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarrow. This is The Daily.

00:00:16 Speaker_10
On Sunday, after a fire that many feared would destroy it, and a swift renovation that defied all predictions,

00:00:36 Speaker_08
the Cathedral of Notre Dame reopened to the public. Today, chief architecture critic Michael Kimmelman with the story of the miracle on the Seine. It's Wednesday, December 11th. Michael, welcome to The Daily.

00:01:17 Speaker_02
Thank you, Michael. Pleasure to be here.

00:01:19 Speaker_08
I'm just going to acknowledge that we have been trying to get you on the show for seven years. And then two days more, because over the past couple of days there's been a tremendous amount of very serious news.

00:01:33 Speaker_08
The government in Syria fell a closely watched manhunt for the suspected murderer of the CEO of a major healthcare company. That case got cracked wide open, all of which delayed this much-awaited debut of yours on the show. And today is the day.

00:01:49 Speaker_08
You, our chief architecture critic. finally here talking about something worthy of your biography, Notre Dame.

00:02:00 Speaker_02
So, welcome. Well, better late than never, I hope. Yes.

00:02:04 Speaker_08
Well, just to begin, do you remember the first time you stepped inside that cathedral?

00:02:12 Speaker_02
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.

00:02:30 Speaker_02
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.

00:02:42 Speaker_08
So your memory of it is vague, but the impression I'm getting is that whatever it did to you, it did something.

00:02:49 Speaker_02
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.

00:03:04 Speaker_08
So let's fast forward a good deal to several years ago. Where were you when you first heard that Notre Dame was burning?

00:03:16 Speaker_02
I remember very vividly where I was. I was on my bike rushing to an appointment on the west side of Manhattan.

00:03:26 Speaker_02
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. Because Notre Dame has a giant stone building?

00:03:49 Speaker_02
I didn't think it could burn down, and it sounded sort of inconceivable. It's like Everest. It doesn't burn down. So I... 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.

00:04:02 Speaker_02
So I said, Michael, that doesn't make sense. He said, I think you just better look on your phone. Right. And I went to find a live feed, and there it was.

00:04:20 Speaker_06
I'm now turning to the back of the cathedral. It is a terrible scene here. The roof has entirely collapsed. There are flames coming out of the back of the cathedral as if it was a torch. It looks like the Olympic torch from the back.

00:04:33 Speaker_02
— 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.

00:04:54 Speaker_03
— Maybe it's a sign from God, I don't know. It's not normal.

00:04:59 Speaker_02
— It really was as if the world had stopped.

00:05:01 Speaker_03
— I see people crying, I see a lot of emotions, and I'm shocked myself. — It's like your family loses somebody.

00:05:10 Speaker_01
— Both my sister and I said, you know, we are actually feeling physical pain watching Notre Dame.

00:05:19 Speaker_04
You feel like it's part of you. And when you look at this 12th century medieval cathedral up in flames, it's like a knife.

00:05:29 Speaker_00
It's very hard for me not to cry right now. And I've been crying on and off the whole day. It just has touched me and touched everyone in France, I think, very, very deeply.

00:05:41 Speaker_02
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.

00:06:00 Speaker_02
So, I rushed back to my computer.

00:06:03 Speaker_02
I started making a few phone calls and trying to figure that out, trying to understand what the building had meant over time, 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

00:06:27 Speaker_02
almost 900 years that we were living at that moment when this building would go away.

00:06:33 Speaker_08
Well, I'm curious, when this inquiry is moving along and you're making phone calls and you're researching the history of Notre Dame and trying to understand why the feelings about its burning are so widespread and so deep, what do you find?

00:06:50 Speaker_02
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.

00:07:01 Speaker_02
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.

00:07:15 Speaker_02
You know, whether buildings were cool-looking, they were fetishized, aestheticized. And there's definitely an aspect of that that's important in architecture. I've always felt that, really, architecture is much larger than that.

00:07:29 Speaker_02
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. They have to be used.

00:07:39 Speaker_02
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 1,000 years.

00:07:55 Speaker_08
Well, tell us a little bit about that history, and I suspect through that we will understand what it has meant to us during that entire period.

00:08:03 Speaker_02
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.

00:08:16 Speaker_02
And that island is where what came to be called Paris started.

00:08:21 Speaker_08
Literally.

00:08:21 Speaker_02
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 Parisii. I didn't know any of this. There you go. You're welcome. I hope it's true.

00:08:44 Speaker_02
And then when the church was there, there was original religious buildings and sanctuaries built on the island over centuries. It was invaded by Vikings.

00:08:55 Speaker_02
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.

00:09:03 Speaker_02
It was a little like the pyramids in the sense that these were buildings of an incredible scale and ambition. weirdness and majesty, complexity.

00:09:13 Speaker_02
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.

00:09:29 Speaker_02
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. There's a plaque on the plaza in front of it.

00:09:43 Speaker_08
In other words, all French roads quite literally lead to this cathedral.

00:09:49 Speaker_02
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.

00:10:04 Speaker_02
And when the revolution happened, you had, you know, the insurgents of the revolution, they ransacked Notre Dame. It was simple. They hated the church.

00:10:16 Speaker_02
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 turn them into cannonballs and coins.

00:10:28 Speaker_08
It's fascinating because what could better embody the idea of a single building's importance to a place than it becomes a central target of an effort to overturn the entire system?

00:10:38 Speaker_02
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.

00:10:49 Speaker_02
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.

00:11:06 Speaker_02
And then that also caused Victor Hugo, the writer,

00:11:13 Speaker_02
to write a book about a hunchback bell ringer, in which 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.

00:11:27 Speaker_08
I don't think we can miss an opportunity since you brought it with you to read from the hunchback of Notre Dame.

00:11:35 Speaker_02
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.

00:11:51 Speaker_02
He says, the Church of Notre-Dame de Paris is without doubt, even today, a sublime and majestic building.

00:11:59 Speaker_02
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.

00:12:15 Speaker_02
It's a call to arms. It's a call to arms, exactly. Great buildings, he says, like great mountains, are the works of centuries. The man, the individual, and the artist are erased from these great piles, which bear no author's name.

00:12:30 Speaker_02
They are the summary and summation of human intelligence. Time is the architect, the nation the builder. Which I think is interesting, Michael, because That's the point. Notre Dame, for him, represented France.

00:12:44 Speaker_02
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.

00:13:06 Speaker_02
And that book came at the same time as a movement was rising in France to preserve its heritage. And those two things led to the restoration of Notre Dame in the 19th century, to prevent its collapse, basically, and to restore it.

00:13:30 Speaker_02
And that was a key moment in the history of not just Notre Dame and Paris, but the whole idea of historic preservation globally.

00:13:45 Speaker_08
It reminds me of what you said at the beginning of this conversation about architecture, is that this is not some abstract piece of architecture. It's living, it's breathing, it tells us something essential about who we are at any given moment.

00:13:59 Speaker_08
And Hugo, as you said, he's not saying that through an especially religious lens. He's seeing this more as a secular temple.

00:14:09 Speaker_02
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.

00:14:26 Speaker_02
We got the spire that then became famous on the Paris skyline. Hugo's book also made it more of an attraction. 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.

00:14:41 Speaker_02
More of them than went to see the Eiffel Tower in Paris. More of them than 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?

00:15:01 Speaker_02
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.

00:15:18 Speaker_02
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. It was a guy who probably left a cigarette butt lighted in the rafters.

00:15:33 Speaker_02
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.

00:15:43 Speaker_08
Well, since you just brought it up, remind us how severe this fire ends up being.

00:15:49 Speaker_02
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.

00:16:00 Speaker_08
Right. You were wrong when you were on the bike telling your editor it couldn't burn. There's a lot of wood in that cathedral.

00:16:07 Speaker_02
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.

00:16:24 Speaker_02
It was a building they didn't want to use powerful hoses in. They had to go inside and try to put it out. There was a point at which they went into the Bells Towers in order to prevent them from collapsing.

00:16:36 Speaker_02
If they had, the whole building would have gone down. So what started as a fire store by a cigarette butt was really a kind of existential crisis for Notre Dame and for the world.

00:16:47 Speaker_08
Right. And the question immediately became, what do you do after one of the world's great, important, essential, beloved buildings is this badly damaged?

00:17:02 Speaker_02
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.

00:17:19 Speaker_02
Well, the French prime minister hastily proposed that there be an architectural competition to reimagine the roof. That's an invitation for every whack-a-doodle proposal you can imagine. Architects salivate at the prospect of such a proposal.

00:17:36 Speaker_02
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.

00:17:49 Speaker_08
Wow, that's on the nose.

00:17:51 Speaker_02
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,

00:18:04 Speaker_02
cooler heads, 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.

00:18:22 Speaker_02
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.

00:18:42 Speaker_02
Yes, I thought it was nuts. I even told my editors, there was absolutely no way this would happen in five years. 20 years, we'll check in in 10 years, don't worry about this. There's nothing really to see here. And it turns out I was wrong again.

00:18:59 Speaker_02
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 miracle.

00:19:19 Speaker_08
We'll be right back. So, Michael, tell us how France did this, how they pulled this on-time miracle off.

00:19:37 Speaker_02
Well, the president, Macron, assigned a general to run the operation, a man named Georges Allain, and he ran it like a military operation. They cordoned off the cathedral. It meant you had essentially like a mystery in plain sight.

00:19:51 Speaker_02
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.

00:19:58 Speaker_02
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.

00:20:14 Speaker_02
They basically told you, no way. They were preoccupied, and I understand. And they surrounded the cathedral with this wall that told you information about Notre Dame and eventually showed pictures of some of the workers.

00:20:28 Speaker_02
But you could never see on the other side of it. You would occasionally see, you know, stuff going on the cranes, obviously on the scaffolding. But it was really hard to know what was going on for a long time.

00:20:40 Speaker_02
And finally, after five years of begging and pleading and leaning really heavily on our wonderful colleague Aurelien Breedon in Paris, we got the word in June. We could come in one day next week.

00:20:54 Speaker_02
I didn't know what that meant, whether we had an hour or 45 minutes, whether we had two hours, we had the whole day. I didn't know who we were seeing, but I packed my bags and flew to Paris. Right.

00:21:04 Speaker_08
So, this is not exactly living inside the cathedral as you had originally thought, but you have this chance. So, tell us about this one day you get to go inside.

00:21:18 Speaker_02
I land in Paris, I meet Aurelien for breakfast nearby, we walk over the cathedral, and we're 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 times like, naked naked?

00:21:37 Speaker_02
Like French naked or? So I think what this probably was about was a holdover from the fact that there had been concerns about the lead.

00:21:50 Speaker_08
A component of the original construction.

00:21:52 Speaker_02
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 mood issue.

00:22:07 Speaker_02
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. Hundreds of workers, a real beehive.

00:22:23 Speaker_02
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.

00:22:44 Speaker_03
Are you happy you're in here? A bit, yeah. A bit?

00:22:49 Speaker_07
Only a bit? I'd understand that.

00:22:54 Speaker_02
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?

00:23:06 Speaker_02
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, and that, you know, they were proud of.

00:23:20 Speaker_03
The kind of job I think I'm not going to do again. At least not on this roof.

00:23:26 Speaker_08
There are many times when I could have left and I haven't left yet.

00:23:30 Speaker_05
Right. Why? Still not born.

00:23:35 Speaker_02
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.

00:23:47 Speaker_02
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.

00:23:59 Speaker_09
We are all really friendly together.

00:24:04 Speaker_02
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.

00:24:17 Speaker_08
All that wood that had burned.

00:24:18 Speaker_02
Exactly.

00:24:19 Speaker_08
Five years ago.

00:24:28 Speaker_02
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,

00:24:47 Speaker_02
The cathedral was in disrepair. The roof was leaking. Some of that wood was rotting. Repairs had started on the cathedral, but also there were some people who tried to document the cathedral.

00:24:59 Speaker_02
There were a couple of French architects who'd gone up to the rafters and the spire and recorded every detail of what there was, down to the finest degree.

00:25:10 Speaker_02
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.

00:25:22 Speaker_02
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

00:25:38 Speaker_02
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.

00:25:54 Speaker_07
He's basically saying they did the opposite of what the middle-aged carpenters did. The middle-aged carpenters, they found a tree, and then they worked with that tree, and they did the opposite.

00:26:03 Speaker_07
They looked at what they had, and then they had to look for a tree that matched what it had. Exactly. They had to reproduce.

00:26:10 Speaker_08
I'm trying to envision people going out into the forests of France, looking at trees and saying, ah, that one is worthy of that beam. You'll remember Francois in the rafters up there, cut down that tree.

00:26:22 Speaker_02
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.

00:26:38 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's incredible, really, because you're reviving ancient techniques.

00:26:44 Speaker_05
Not for the folklore. But also because there was a reason why. They had 800 years. That's pretty good. Exactly, that's pretty good.

00:26:58 Speaker_02
This was because the previous beams had lasted for 800 years. 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.

00:27:15 Speaker_08
That's extraordinary.

00:27:16 Speaker_02
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.

00:27:27 Speaker_08
Devotional to the original workers and the original mission and meaning of this entire cathedral.

00:27:36 Speaker_02
Exactly. Devotional to the techniques that date 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.

00:27:53 Speaker_02
There's a group called the Compagnie du Devoir, which dates back to the 12th century, a group of artisans, and there were more than a thousand applications. when the decision was made to restore the cathedral.

00:28:06 Speaker_02
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.

00:28:21 Speaker_02
And I saw that in the workers themselves, because it was not just reopening a tourist site, it was reviving a whole culture. It was sustaining something that had lasted for nearly a thousand years.

00:28:33 Speaker_08
I'm curious, once you get down from the roof, and you are witnessing this exceptionally faithful devotional effort to bring the roof back to what it looked like a thousand years ago, what you saw on the interior, probably the best known portions of Notre Dame.

00:28:51 Speaker_02
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.

00:29:03 Speaker_02
But pretty quickly, it became clear to me what had happened. I could see suddenly that the cathedral was spanking clean, bright. And I looked up, and there had been all these famous images of the

00:29:15 Speaker_02
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.

00:29:25 Speaker_02
And this kaleidoscopic light coming through these stained glass windows, which survived the fire. But what was also kind of a miracle,

00:29:36 Speaker_02
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. Because every material, every angle, every quality of the building could be reproduced now.

00:29:57 Speaker_02
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. It's a volume that has a certain patient quality. He said, D major sounds really good in Notre Dame.

00:30:16 Speaker_02
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.

00:30:30 Speaker_02
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.

00:30:47 Speaker_08
Well, that makes me wonder, as an architecture critic, did you have, by the end of this tour, by the end of this coveted day that you got, some kind of final assessment of the experience of this restored cathedral.

00:31:05 Speaker_02
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.

00:31:17 Speaker_02
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.

00:31:29 Speaker_02
And kind of they'd become attached to that quality of the Michelangelo's 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.

00:31:45 Speaker_02
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.

00:31:52 Speaker_08
Basically, you should prepare yourself for going inside a thousand-year-old building that has been power-washed.

00:31:58 Speaker_02
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.

00:32:12 Speaker_02
So few things nowadays seem sort of unimpeachable and just good. And that was the main takeaway I had about this project. It had not just gone well, but it seemed to be something that brought people together.

00:32:28 Speaker_02
It seemed to be something people could attribute larger meaning to.

00:32:33 Speaker_08
Well, you're getting at the question I've been waiting to ask you this entire conversation, which is, if architecture, as you have laid out here, tells us something about us, what did this renovation, this project, tell us about ourselves right now?

00:32:47 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:02 Speaker_02
France is still coming apart. Walk down the street. still worry about whether there's going to be crime and homelessness. I don't want to overstate the case. But I do think Notre Dame reminds us that the places we build give us this sense of community.

00:33:19 Speaker_02
They give us a sense of each other. The coming together itself, which is what the cathedral's about, is a sign of hope for us. It's the thing that we wish we can do.

00:33:29 Speaker_08
It's our best selves.

00:33:30 Speaker_02
It's our best selves. Right. Notre Dame is our best selves.

00:33:34 Speaker_08
And now it's in the best shape that it's ever been in probably a thousand years, if that's not a sign of human progress.

00:33:43 Speaker_02
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.

00:33:54 Speaker_02
And they found themselves crestfall, shocked really by how they felt when it burned. And I think That was the realization for many people, that this building had a place in their own lives that they hadn't even understood before.

00:34:08 Speaker_02
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.

00:34:28 Speaker_02
It allows us to think we can go back We haven't lost touch, essentially, with not just with the past, but with ourselves. Just before I left the cathedral, I was speaking with a woman who showed us around, and I asked her directly, are you Catholic?

00:34:51 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:13 Speaker_02
That for her, this was also something that she would remember for the rest of her life. That she lived at this moment.

00:35:30 Speaker_02
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.

00:35:44 Speaker_02
Maybe that was the original idea for the people who built the cathedral nearly a thousand years ago.

00:35:56 Speaker_08
Oh, Michael, on that really beautiful note, thank you very, very much.

00:36:02 Speaker_02
Thank you, Michael.

00:36:03 Speaker_09
It's been a pleasure. We'll be right back.

00:36:31 Speaker_08
Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, Israel said it had destroyed Syria's navy during a series of airstrikes in what it described as defensive measures designed to protect itself against Syria's new government.

00:36:49 Speaker_08
But the attacks have defied warnings from Western governments, who fear they may ignite a new conflict in the region, and fear that Israel is using the fall of Syria's government as an opportunity to take offensive actions.

00:37:07 Speaker_08
As the Assad government fell over the weekend, Israeli ground forces advanced beyond the demilitarized zone on the Israeli-Syria border, marking Israel's first overt entry into Syrian territory in more than 50 years.

00:37:27 Speaker_08
Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto and Jessica Chung. It was edited by Michael Benoit, contains original music by Dan Powell, Pat McCusker, Marion Lozano, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

00:37:43 Speaker_08
Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landfurg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Aurelien Breeden, Ségolène Lestradek, and Catherine Porter. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Bilboro. See you tomorrow.