Viollet le duc

Pierrefonds

Prior to his work on Notre Dame, Le Duc was known for several other restorations, including that of Pierrefonds, a Chateau in Northern France. This like Notre Dame, was not a like for like restoration, but instead a redesign to create the ideal French castle. It subsequently became the inspiration for the Walt Disney’s Cinderella Castle

Part of our Primer work involved researching and representing the history of Notre Dame and Paris, to demonstrate how changes that shaped the city over time also served to effect the cathedral. This was collated into a series of collages as orthogonal drawings, to give us a detailed time-line of Notre Dame’ s life.

In 1163, Pope Alexander III laid the first stone of the cathedral of Notre Dame. The building, produced in a French variation of the Gothic style was worked on until 1190. By which time it’s choir, transepts and side aisles were completed.

By 1345 the cathedral was complete, the final phases of work saw the famous rose windows completed and installed in the transepts and west facade. As well as this the roof of the choir was reconstructed to be lighter, and the apse windows were elongated to match those of the nave.

1200-1250 saw the rest of the cathedral completed. Between the two phases is a small but visible difference in style, resulting from advancements in flying buttress technology that allowed the size of the windows to be increased, and the structure made more delicate

Little in the structure of the cathedral changed until the counter-reformation. To distance itself from the minimal puritanical approach to church decoration adopted by protestants, Notre Dame was furnished with new altars and art that celebrated the wealth and power of the church.

1789 saw the French revolution break out in Paris, the Catholic Church was outlawed, and the cathedral stripped of all its ornamentation and religious decoration. In its place, an artificial mountain was constructed as part of a conversion that saw it transformed into a Temple of Reason.

In 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte had himself crowned Emperor in Notre Dame. In an attempt to align himself and France as the successor of Rome, he had the cathedral whitewashed and artificial classical columns made to encase the original Gothic ones.

The Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1830. This led to increased interest in the buildings associated with the Ancien Regime. A competition was held of the restoration of the decaying cathedral. And was won by Jean-Bapiste Lassus and Eugene Viollet le duc.

The period of 1852-1870 saw dramatic changes in Paris’ urban landscape under Georges-Eugene Hausmann. Around Notre Dame houses were cleared and streets widened to provide specific views of the cathedral. With most of his changes still present.

Notre Dame survived both World Wars relatively unscathed, despite the Nazi occupation of Paris. Its windows and statues were either removed or protected with boards and sandbags. The cathedrals survival helped to mark it as a symbol of the French Nations endurance and struggle.

In April 2019 however, whilst repairs were being made the Cathedrals roof, a fire broke out, destroying the cathedrals roof and spire which in turn broke 3 holes in the central vaults. The damage led to much of the cathedrals ancient structure being comprimised. President Macron vowed to repair the vast structure in 5 years, in time for the 2024 Olympics

My Initial massing was rooted in a desire to re-frame the Cathedral physically with a series of large solid forms that would obscure the cathedral from several approaches, and frame two famous views. Whilst the form and style of the building would change significantly throughout the year, the idea of re-framing Notre Dame would form the basis of much of my design work going forward. As would the utilization of the crypt museum

Above

Sketch Plan, with maintained views in red

Right Perspective sketch

Below

Seketch section

Quick sketches

I sketched several different ideas for my massing, this exposed steel frame structure was an idea I discarded for Primer, but something I would come back to later and develop further. The method used for these sketches involved tracing the context from our massing model photos, a technique I would continue to use to contextualise my ideas

Our Primer exhibition was designed around displaying and conveying all that we had learned and discussed about Notre Dame in the previous weeks. Just as we had been forced to confront and try to understand the cathedrals history for our work, so we designed the exhibition with the intention that it would force people to interact with our findings. Thus we used a principle staircase for the display, and placed our large collages in such a way as to obscure people route , forcing them on some level to interact and engage with the Notre Dame and Paris’ past.