If time travel was possible, medieval carpenters would surely be amazed to see how woodworking techniques they pioneered in building Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral more than 800 years ago are being used again today to rebuild the world-famous monument’s fire-ravaged roof.
Certainly the reverse is true for the modern-day carpenters using medieval-era skills. Working with hand axes to fashion hundreds of tonnes of oak beams for the framework of Notre Dame’s new roof has, for them, been like rewinding time. It has given them a new appreciation of their predecessors’ handiwork that pushed the architectural envelope back in the 13th century.
“It’s a little mind-bending sometimes,” said Peter Henrikson, one of the carpenters.
Photo: AP
He said there were times when he was whacking mallet on chisel that he found himself thinking about medieval counterparts who were cutting “basically the same joint 900 years ago.”
“It’s fascinating,” he said. “We probably are in some ways thinking the same things.”
The use of hand tools to rebuild the roof that flames turned into ashes in 2019 is a deliberate, considered choice, especially since power tools would undoubtedly have done the work more quickly. The aim is to pay tribute to the astounding craftsmanship of the cathedral’s original builders and to ensure that the centuries-old art of hand-fashioning wood lives on.
“We want to restore this cathedral as it was built in the Middle Ages,” said Jean-Louis Georgelin, a retired French army general who is overseeing the reconstruction.
“It is a way to be faithful to the [handiwork] of all the people who built all the extraordinary monuments in France,” he said.
Facing a tight deadline to reopen the cathedral by December next year, carpenters and architects are also using computer design and other modern technologies to speed the reconstruction. Computers were used in the drawing of detailed plans for carpenters, to help ensure that their hand-chiseled beams fit together perfectly.
“Traditional carpenters had a lot of that in their head,” Henrikson said. It’s “pretty amazing to think about how they did this with what they had, the tools and technology that they had at the time.”
The 61-year-old American is from Grand Marais, Minnesota. The bulk of the other artisans working on the timber frame are French.
The roof reconstruction hit an important milestone this month, when large parts of the new timber frame were assembled and erected at a workshop in the Loire Valley in western France.
The dry run assured architects that the frame is fit for purpose. The next time it is put together will be atop the cathedral. Unlike in medieval times, it will be trucked into Paris and lifted by mechanical crane into position. About 1,200 trees have been felled for the work.
“The objective we had was to restore to its original condition the wooden frame structure that disappeared during the fire of April 15, 2019,” said architect Remi Fromont, who did detailed drawings of the original frame in 2012.
The rebuilt frame “is the same wooden frame structure of the 13th century,” he said. “We have exactly the same material: oak. We have the same tools, with the same axes that were used, exactly the same tools. We have the same know-how. And soon, it will return to its same place.”
“It is a real resurrection,” he added.
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
DIVERSIFY: While Japan already has plentiful access to LNG, a pipeline from Alaska would help it move away from riskier sources such as Russia and the Middle East Japan is considering offering support for a US$44 billion gas pipeline in Alaska as it seeks to court US President Donald Trump and forestall potential trade friction, three officials familiar with the matter said. Officials in Tokyo said Trump might raise the project, which he has said is key for US prosperity and security, when he meets Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba for the first time in Washington as soon as next week, the sources said. Japan has doubts about the viability of the proposed 1,287km pipeline — intended to link fields in Alaska’s north to a port in the south, where
RSS