Introduction to The Notre-Dame Effect
- Introduction to The Notre-Dame Effect
The essays in this special issue of Future Anterior bring the fire that ravaged the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris on April 15, 2019, into a larger intellectual context and challenge us to consider the effects and ramifications of the calamity within the discipline of preservation. They are reflections illuminated by the flame of this calamity, which was, let’s not forget, ignited within the work of preservation, within the scaffolding set up precisely to protect the building.
That scaffolding, like all preservation scaffoldings, was not simply a physical construction. It was also an intellectual structure made of disparate political, economic, social, and cultural elements that were joined together according to various historical processes and habits, which are vulgarly described as the way things are done: preservation practice. When the critical load of Notre-Dame, itself weakened by years of neglect, leaned against this intellectual structure, it catastrophically unraveled the weakened and fatigued joints. Unhinged from each other, political, economic, social, cultural, and preservation elements pushed and pulled at cross-purposes.
Clearly there is a French specificity to the fatigued joinery, but as the essays in this issue make clear, that is no comfort to the rest of the world. As the oldest modern preservation bureaucracy in the world, French intellectual joinery was used as a pattern book in erecting preservation scaffoldings throughout the world. French patterns of intellectual joinery are found deep within the myriad structures of conception, administration, and regulation of heritage globally. They can be found in Brazil, where the National Museum was incinerated in 2018; in Okinawa, where Shuri Castle combusted in 2019; and in England, where Clandon Park ignited in 2015, just to name a few of the tragic losses that cannot be brushed off as aberrations of chance. They illuminate a global process, a gradual loss of cohesion among the financial, political, social, and cultural elements that once shared an interest in joining forces to protect these heritage buildings. If they unraveled in France, the rest of the world should take notice; document and assess the effects of outdated assumptions on the conditions of the intellectual joinery that holds together their own thinking; and identify their intellectual pathologies, uncover their sources, and test experimental treatments or replacements, not necessarily in kind. [End Page iii]
The Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris is deeply ingrained in the mind of every preservationist as the textbook example of the theory and practice of restoration. To say that Notre-Dame is part of the canon of preservation is to recognize the deep intellectual engagement of generations of preservationists in it. For nearly two centuries, beginning in 1844 with Lassus and Viollet-le Duc, Notre Dame has stood as the grindstone against which and through which countless preservationists have sharpened their thinking about what preservation is and can be.
To engage in the material fabric of Notre-Dame one has to first climb on the scaffold of thoughts that make up our discipline, the échafaudage, which as Viollet-le-Duc reminds us, was perfected through siege warfare as both an extension of the constructive logic of the walls and as a means to disassemble them, to deconstruct them according to their own logic, precisely in order to preserve them. Scaffolds have been raised, physically and conceptually, against the walls of Notre-Dame many times throughout its history. An old one just burned down, and is currently being replaced. The essays in this issue call for the replacement to incorporate different elements and be joined together in new and more robust ways.
By definition, scaffolds, intellectual or physical, cannot stand on their own. They must be attached to another preexisting structure. Particularly in the case of preservation scaffoldings, those prior structures cannot be taken for granted, as they might be unstable. Every time, the locations of their anchoring points have to be carefully studied. They need to be secured into stable antecedents and firm material fabric. Yet they must be close enough to the weakened areas to allow access to them.
The fatal mistake is to anchor a scaffold only into fabric of unknown firmness, as it will surely...
