Notre Dame de Paris is burning

[Whiskeyjack]

 

[ACamp1900]

Honestly, my first thought at seeing the above was how it's far less damage than I expected based off of the scale of flames and such we saw yesterday.

 

[Legacy]

The North Rose Window

 

[NorthDakota]

Sounds like prominent French folks/companies have already pledged several hundred million to renovation efforts.

 

[NDBoiler]

Sounds like prominent French folks/companies have already pledged several hundred million to renovation efforts.

Just read an article on USAtoday that UND pledged $100k to rebuild. It’s not my money, but that seems light to me given the context of an iconic Catholic university helping to rebuild an iconic cathedral. Maybe I’m way off base though.

 

[ab2cmiller]

Just read an article on USAtoday that UND pledged $100k to rebuild. It’s not my money, but that seems light to me given the context of an iconic Catholic university helping to rebuild an iconic cathedral. Maybe I’m way off base though.

If ND pledged a million dollars, people would be screaming bloody murder. It's large enough of a token contribution to make a point, but not so large that it would cause push-back.

I'm curious what kind of insurance coverage they had and if there will be a large gap between the insurance settlement and the cost to rebuild.

 

[ACamp1900]

If ND pledged a million dollars, people would be screaming bloody murder. It's large enough of a token contribution to make a point, but not so large that it would cause push-back.

I'm curious what kind of insurance coverage they had and if there will be a large gap between the insurance settlement and the cost to rebuild.

This... they prob felt compelled to make a gesture but seriously, I'm from the other line of thought... I'm sure NDP won't be wanting for funds here.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Yup. It's an effective gesture. Large enough to not be insulting, but also small enough that it's not pulling money away from the University's core mission. They have budgets for this sort of spending.

 

[NDBoiler]

If ND pledged a million dollars, people would be screaming bloody murder. It's large enough of a token contribution to make a point, but not so large that it would cause push-back.

I'm curious what kind of insurance coverage they had and if there will be a large gap between the insurance settlement and the cost to rebuild.

I understand the point about push back, but a million seems more appropriate to me.

Im guessing there is either no insurance or a large gap in coverage. Something that valuable would likely not have insurers willing to take on that large of a potential claim risk. I work for a very large company and no insurers would dare touch us with a 10 foot pole, as it would likely sink them if there was a large claim. We therefore set aside retained earnings and are self insured. Not sure if a church would operate like that.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

I understand the point about push back, but a million seems more appropriate to me.

Im guessing there is either no insurance or a large gap in coverage. Something that valuable would likely not have insurers willing to take on that large of a potential claim risk. I work for a very large company and no insurers would dare touch us with a 10 foot pole, as it would likely sink them if there was a large claim. We therefore set aside retained earnings and are self insured. Not sure if a church would operate like that.

If the fire actually was started by a construction worker, then whatever firm was contracted to perform the work is likely going to implode, as well as their insurer.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The NYT's Ross Douthat just published an article titled "From the Ashes of Notre-Dame":

A first draft of this column was written before flames engulfed the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, before its spire fell in one of the most dreadful live images since Sept. 11, 2001, before a blazing fire went further than any of France’s anticlerical revolutionaries ever dared.

My original subject was the latest controversy in Catholicism’s now-years-long Lent, in which conflicts over theology and sex abuse have merged into one festering, suppurating mess. The instigator of controversy, this time, was the former pope, the 92-year-old Benedict XVI, who late last week surprised the Catholic intelligentsia with a 6,000-word reflection on the sex abuse crisis.

Portions of the document were edifying, but there was little edifying in its reception. It was passed first to conservative Catholic outlets, whose palpable Benedict nostalgia was soon matched by fierce criticism from Francis partisans, plus sneers from the secular press at the retired pope’s insistence that the sex abuse epidemic was linked to the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the 1970s.

The column I was writing before the fire was mostly a lament for what the document’s reception betokened: A general inability, Catholic and secular, to recognize that both the “conservative” and “liberal” accounts of the sex abuse crisis are partially correct, that the spirits of liberation and clericalism each contributed their part, that the abuse problem dramatically worsened during the sexual revolution (a boring empirical fact if you spend any time with the data or the history) even as it also had roots in more traditional patterns of clerical chauvinism, hierarchical arrogance, institutional self-protection.

So the column was a defense of Benedict’s argument, in part, against secular sneers and liberal-Catholic sniping. But then it also agreed with certain criticisms of his letter, and worried about the ways that such an intervention contributes to the sense of a church in pieces, a church almost with two popes, each offering partial diagnoses to their respective factions.

That’s where I was, what I had at least half-written, before the fire began in Paris. But now let me try to say something larger, something commensurate to the symbolism of one of Catholicism’s greatest monuments burning on Holy Week, a day before Benedict’s own birthday, on the day after Catholics listened to a gospel in which the veil of the temple was rent from top to bottom.

That larger thing is this: The problem of Catholic narratives that can’t find synthesis, of “liberal” and “conservative” takes that feed angrily off one another, of popes and former popes as symbols grasped by partisans, is not the problem of the sex abuse crisis. It is simply the problem of Roman Catholicism in this age — an age in which the church mirrors the polarization of Western culture, rather than offering an integrated alternative.

The church has always depended on synthesis and integration. That has been part of its genius, a reason for all its unexpected resurrections and regenerations. Faith and reason, Athens and Jerusalem, the aesthetic and the ascetic, the mystical and the philosophical — even the crucifix itself, two infinite lines converging and combining.

Notre-Dame de Paris is a monument to a particularly triumphant moment of Catholic synthesis — the culture of the high Middle Ages, a renaissance before the Renaissance, at once Roman and Germanic but both transformed by Christianity, a new hybrid civilization embodied in the cathedral’s brooding, complicated, gorgeous sprawl.

The Catholicism of today builds nothing so gorgeous as Notre-Dame in part because it has no 21st-century version of that grand synthesis to offer. The reforms of the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council and everything after, have left the church partially and unsuccessfully transformed, torn between competing visions of how to be Catholic in modernity, competing promises of renewal and reform, competing factions convinced that they are the firefighters inside Notre-Dame, and their rivals are the fire.

I belong to one of these factions (or to a faction within a faction; who can keep track?); I am a conservative of some sort, who fears that liberal Christianities usually end up resembling a post-inferno cathedral, with the still-grand exterior concealing emptiness within.

But I am also doubtful that anything so simple as a conservative “victory” will return the church to cathedral-raising vigor and make it feel, to outsiders, like something more than a museum whose docents all seem to hate one another. Especially given how often conservative Catholicism is in thrall to orthodoxies that are political rather than theological, how often — especially as it reacts to the destabilizing style of Pope Francis — its climate feels more like an airless bunker than a Gothic nave.

And it is impossible, as a Catholic, to be writing about this subject while the Cathedral of Notre-Dame is literally burning on Holy Week and not feel that everyone engaged in Catholicism’s civil wars is being judged, and found wanting, and given a harrowing lesson in what is actually asked of us.

The cathedral will be rebuilt; the cross and altar and much of the interior survived. But all preservation is provisional. The real challenge for Catholics, in this age of general post-Christian cultural exhaustion, is to look at what our ancestors did and imagine what it would mean to do that again, to build anew, to leave something behind that could stand a thousand years and still have men and women singing “Salve Regina” outside its cruciform walls, as Parisians did tonight while Notre-Dame burned.

What is the synthesis that could make that possible? What lies beyond the stalemates and scandal and anger of our strange two-pope era?

Go ask the Catholics of 3019 A.D. It’s for them to know, and us, if God wills it, to find out.

 

[NDBoiler]

If the fire actually was started by a construction worker, then whatever firm was contracted to perform the work is likely going to implode, as well as their insurer.

Yup

 

[FDNYIrish1]

Great care was taken to both rescue important artifacts and protect as much as they could of the interior . Venting the Rose window is an integral part of the tactics of fighting a church fire. The pre incident guideline of the FD was posted online for the cathedral. Great job on an incredibly dangerous fire at such a high profile location.

 

[calvegas04]

The Catholic church is worth between 10-15 billion they will be okay if they need money

 

[IrishLax]

If the fire actually was started by a construction worker, then whatever firm was contracted to perform the work is likely going to implode, as well as their insurer.

Insurer will probably be fine, there is always a limit in the coverage during construction and it is always a loss that they can handle. They are not going to cover full loss of a historic structure like that because it's impossible.

 

[GATTACA!]

Pictures are circulating showing that the famed Rose Windows are still completely in tact. I'm unsure how so much could have been preserved.

Yes they are very tasteful.

 

[wizards8507]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">BREAKING: France announces an international architects' competition to rebuild the spire of Notre Dame Cathedral. <a href="https://t.co/QzKw30c0Cg">https://t.co/QzKw30c0Cg</a></p>— The Associated Press (@AP) <a href="https://twitter.com/AP/status/1118470593681207297?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 17, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[IrishLax]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">BREAKING: France announces an international architects' competition to rebuild the spire of Notre Dame Cathedral. <a href="https://t.co/QzKw30c0Cg">https://t.co/QzKw30c0Cg</a></p>— The Associated Press (@AP) <a href="https://twitter.com/AP/status/1118470593681207297?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 17, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Just a truly awful decision with potential for a disastrous outcome. It's sad that the governing authority on Notre Dame isn't the Vatican.

 

[ACamp1900]

Just a truly awful decision with potential for a disastrous outcome. It's sad that the governing authority on Notre Dame isn't the Vatican.

I assumed that it was... interesting...

 

[zelezo vlk]

From what I recall, the French government never gave ND back, so it's not up to the Vatican. Even if the Church actually owned the cathedral, it'd almost certainly be up to the archbishop of Paris.

 

[MNIrishman]

Just a truly awful decision with potential for a disastrous outcome. It's sad that the governing authority on Notre Dame isn't the Vatican.

I'm neutral on this. Why is this a bad decision?

 

[Valpodoc85]

Question for the engineers: given the intensity of the fire, is there concern regarding the structural integrity of the stone. Could a wall fall down in a storm?

 

[Legacy]

How fortunate!

The Images That Could Help Rebuild Notre-Dame Cathedral
And the young, brilliant professor who made them before he died

Notre Dame Cathedral's restoration is imagined through digital scans by architectural historian Andrew Tallon

Laser Light on Gothic Architecture


Perhaps some of the funding, which is quite significant, can be used on starting laser scanning and restoration of other Gothic structures. Many of France's church both within Paris' arrondissements and in towns throughout the country badly need it.

 

[IrishLax]

Question for the engineers: given the intensity of the fire, is there concern regarding the structural integrity of the stone. Could a wall fall down in a storm?

Extremely unlikely, they almost surely have temporary shoring up at this point.

 

[Valpodoc85]

Just trying to wrap my head around what a restoration would look like. They say the oak came from 10,000 trees! What about building code? Do you use modern materials made to look old. I could imagine some well meaning forward thinking individual trying to build a big dome over the whole thing and calling it good. My heart wants the old church not some modern version of it. Given the current political atmosphere I could see it rebuilt as a site for "all religions and people of peace...". And personally I feel shitty for wanting it for my own.

 

[GATTACA!]

Just trying to wrap my head around what a restoration would look like. They say the oak came from 10,000 trees! What about building code? Do you use modern materials made to look old. I could imagine some well meaning forward thinking individual trying to build a big dome over the whole thing and calling it good. My heart wants the old church not some modern version of it. Given the current political atmosphere I could see it rebuilt as a site for "all religions and people of peace...". And personally I feel shitty for wanting it for my own.

Can you really see any of that lumber once the roof is back on? I'd assume they will use modern fire treated timber.

 

[Circa]

How fortunate!

The Images That Could Help Rebuild Notre-Dame Cathedral
And the young, brilliant professor who made them before he died

Notre Dame Cathedral's restoration is imagined through digital scans by architectural historian Andrew Tallon

Laser Light on Gothic Architecture


Perhaps some of the funding, which is quite significant, can be used on starting laser scanning and restoration of other Gothic structures. Many of France's church both within Paris' arrondissements and in towns throughout the country badly need it.

3D scanning happens everywhere anything of significance Is being built. It's not even interesting to watch and hinders most projects at the time of scanning more than it helps. I'd say most of the structures that are of any historical value around the world have been scanned.

 

[IrishLax]

I'm neutral on this. Why is this a bad decision?

Generally speaking, architecture "contests" are prone to incredibly awful designs being chosen by an empowered few. Often, it lends itself to "modernism" catastrophes on historic structures. It also allows people with an agenda to potentially push that agenda if they can curry enough favor with those reviewing the proposals.

What they should be doing saying "reconstruct Notre Dame to match it's condition at the time of the fire as closely as possible" with strict enforcement of international and national historic restorations standards. What they appear to be doing is quite the opposite, and that's saying "we're open to ideas! let us know what you want Notre Dame to look like!" This is super cringe, even by French standards. Time will tell if they get it right.

 

[GATTACA!]

Generally speaking, architecture "contests" are prone to incredibly awful designs being chosen by an empowered few. Often, it lends itself to "modernism" catastrophes on historic structures. It also allows people with an agenda to potentially push that agenda if they can curry enough favor with those reviewing the proposals.

What they should be doing saying "reconstruct Notre Dame to match it's condition at the time of the fire as closely as possible" with strict enforcement of international and national historic restorations standards. What they appear to be doing is quite the opposite, and that's saying "we're open to ideas! let us know what you want Notre Dame to look like!" This is super cringe, even by French standards. Time will tell if they get it right.

I think there's a nice middle ground in there somewhere. I agree opening up the design process for submissions is super cringey, and presents a lot of issues like the ones you mentioned, but we also don't need to be slaves to the past. This fire, just like all the other catastrophes is going to leave an indelible mark on the cathedral. Hopefully in a few hundred years when people way in the future get a chance to visit the storied Notre Dame cathedral the great fire of 2019 will be part of that story. I think it's okay for there to be some remnants of our fingerprints visible in the reconstruction.

Going forward weather we like it or not, part of the cathedral's significance will be as a testament to our achievements in the almost 900 years since its construction. Our ability to restore the structure will be another awe inspiring element of its greatness.

 

[wizards8507]