What a beauty! Its been rebuilt (restored is a tricky concept here) in largely the same materials and in the same form as the original, prior to various restoration efforts through the centuries, with a few knobs on.

This means that we get a mediaeval cathedral looking like it did when it was conceived and built (with an extra spire and a few other things). The colours are amazing.

Elderly churches, mosques and temples (int al) have a habit of losing their original colours and "feel" across the centuries. They change - age. Stone walls age and thanks to modern pollution darken. Pigments age, disperse and peel off.

Notre Dame has been restored. Not to how it was in 2018, prior the fire ... but to how it was intended when built, with a bit of sympathetic interpretation.

Well done!

One of the most spiritual moments of my life was entering Notre Dame, and I was not expecting it at all, wasn't really excited to go there, and am not really religious. Honestly I expected Stonehenge to be more impactful but Notre Dame is a way more worthy visit.

I'm french. Live in Paris. I do not understand the excitement the world has for Notre Dame. Question for you, reader: what does the fire and/or the rebuild means to you? Why do you care?

It's just so great to know Notre Dame been restored successfully.

Decades ago I took a tour into roof/rafters and I took many photographs because I was interested in the woodworking and construction. I'd dearly love to do that tour again and compare the old with the new.

I have very fond memories of a vrml model with textured surfaces distributed as an .exe for unreal engine. Flights through the inferior and up into the vaults.

I still have the exe but it seems to be very fussy about running and I haven't managed to make a virtual Windows it will tolerate.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/throwback-thursday-vr-notre-d...

We were very lucky to see Notre Dame before it burned. So glad it’s been restored.

Wow that's great! I'll be totally honest, I completely forgot that fire happened until now. It was really big news and at the time I thought it would be the defining moment of 2019, then COVID happened and I pretty much forgot anything else that had happened that year.

Meanwhile Israel is destroying churches and mosques much older than notre dame and the world shrugs..

And they rebuilt it with all the lead that posed problem when it burned.

Lesson not learned. Go figure.

Reminder: the original burned down because of cigarette smoking.

What I really would like to understand is what Musk was doing there? No relation with France or Notre Dame, supposed to be kind of an agnostic and not a "fervent catholic". And why he took the spot of anyone else that could be a fervent catholic just by being rich...

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This modernization ruined it. I've seen it in 2000, I have no interest to see this "restoration".

I wonder what would a ceremony like this look like before the era of cameras broadcasting every move to the entire planet simultaneously. It does seem like a lot of this is performative in the “showtime” sense, and I wonder if the character of an event like this would be more “practical” in another time.

Unlike the Mycenaean Lion's Gate, constructed with stone, using technical dry-stone masonry, Notre Dame was susceptible to sabotage. Post-2019 conflagration, reconstructing its arches, colonnades, spires, and stained glass windows - much of which survived high temperatures is a testament to Gothic architecture. In the Bronze Age, temples, remnants of sacrificial tombs dedicated to resurgent sacrificial rites in satiating Baal, still stand in the outskirts of Jerusalem. Depending on the materials, stone structures will whether incineration, even retaining frescoes prefiguring Christ.

I saw a picture of the insides on another site, it looked like a Disney castle with the stone polished to look almost white. Why not just restore it to look like before the accident?

Such a sign of the world we live in that restoring a old building raises a billion dollars, but we somehow can't afford to house people who are freezing to death in the streets.

I had the privilege of seeing the old Notre Dame right before it burned. It was very cool, but the new one looks like an obsessional desire to remain true to the old form. At one point there was talk of Gehry redesigning it: that would've been interesting! Because when the Notre Dame was rebuilt last, it reflected the architectural limits of its time, the height of the medieval ability and imagination. It is strange to simply replicate that today, when we could do so much more, when the Sagrada Familia, for instance, represents with more force the modern condition.