PARIS — “It’s a phoenix,” a bird that rises from the ashes as Notre-Dame did. It’s also the only visible creation by Philippe Villeneuve, chief architect of the five-year reconstruction project.
The bird in question is the cathedral’s new rooster weathervane, which sits atop the spire, some 315 feet high, turning with the wind. A gilded rooster whose wings rise like flames.
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All it took was one sketch in the architect’s sketchbook, drawn on Dec. 15, 2020, and the shape was decided. Villeneuve, who had miraculously found the old rooster the rubble the day after the fire, could have had it rebuilt.
“It was so beautiful, all dented up, it was a witness to the fire and bore the scars. There was no point in trying to erase them,” he says. That rooster, designed by famed architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the late 1800s and already recast in 1920, was too damaged to be replaced.
Villeneuve saw no point in reproducing it identically, as if nothing had happened. “The new rooster had to tell the story of the fire, the phoenix rising from the ashes and the descent of the Holy Spirit,” he says with the mixture of seriousness and irony to hide his emotion.
Healing the wounds
In a way, the Villeneuve rooster will also tell the story of the construction site, as it contains the list of the 2,000 people who rebuilt the cathedral.
“This project was a matter of survival for her and me. I’m overwhelmed with admiration for the workers who helped me heal the wounds, one by one,” Villeneuve says with the gratitude of a convalescent. The architect has been living like a burn victim since the April 15, 2019 fire, has become one with the cathedral he built as a teenager on a scale model.
“The most important moment in the life of Notre-Dame is not the coronation of Napoleon I, but its reopening after an unprecedented fire. Dec. 8, 2024 is the biggest date in its history,” he says.
There’s a pompous side to those words, but it would be wrong to conclude that they’re the result of an inflated ego. Villeneuve doesn’t think he’s Viollet-le-Duc, who is known for taking creative liberties in restorations: “We restore, we don’t create,” he says. But the architect has tried to get inside his own head and that of the medieval builders, to understand their intentions, their gestures and to reproduce them.
Villeneuve was a fervent advocate for identical reconstruction.
Villeneuve knows how to explain the mixture of wonder and familiarity that draws in visitors. “Notre-Dame is one of the oldest Gothic cathedrals. And yet, it has a boldness and unity that the others don’t have. Its flying buttresses give it a lightness of touch and a grace that has never been equalled.”
“And imagine,” he continues, “a century passed between the construction of the first and last vaults. Yet they are identical, despite the evolution of architecture. This means that each successive master builder took great care to preserve its unity.”
It’s hardly surprising that, apart from the new rooster, Villeneuve was a fervent advocate for identical reconstruction. And he had a powerful argument to sway French President Emmanuel Macron, who was tempted, on the contrary, to “improve” the cathedral: “We can rebuild it in five years if we don’t waste time questioning the project.”
A symbolic reopening
As Notre-Dame reopens, he says, visitors will certainly be surprised. “When you enter the nave, you realize that Notre-Dame is gigantic. You see the whole thing and a myriad of details jump out at you, the cleaned chapels bursting with color and forming a circle of light with the stained glass windows.”
The restoration work has brightened up the edifice by removing the dust that had accumulated since Viollet-le-Duc. “It’s breathtakingly beautiful, and at the same time, it’s taken away a mysterious side, a kind of venerability.” So perhaps visitors should expect to experience mixed feelings of wonder and strangeness. “Visitors will have to make the building their own,” Villeneuve says.
Restoration work will continue on the beams of the north belfry, the exterior of the choir and the completion of the spire roof. But for the architect, the most important thing is that the cathedral “has regained its former silhouette.”
And as “a man of symbols and rites,” he suggested Dec. 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception,” as the date for the reopening mass.
