Philippe Villeneuve, Rémi Fromont, and Pascal Prunet, chief architects for French historic monuments, have supervised the reconstruction, executed by close to 250 firms from a wide range of fields, among them carpentry, stained glass, and metalwork. Especially prized were masters of medieval crafts, such as hand-hewing oak beams with axes for the cathedral’s roughly 300-foot-long roof.
Engineers stabilized and secured the edifice’s exterior, including its elegant flying buttresses; masons used 35,000 cubic feet of limestone to replace what had been marred; specialized teams gently cleaned walls and statues, at times with lasers, to remove soot; art conservationists repaired paintings damaged by smoke and water; and woodworkers re-created the original oak roof structure, known as la forêt, or the forest, by installing a roughly 300-foot-long tangle of beams made from 1,000 trees from across France. New safety measures include fire walls, state-of-the-art alarms, and sprinklers with a misting system to reduce water impact.
Notre-Dame’s towers, with their famed gargoyles and 10 bells, were largely untouched directly by the fire, but they suffered from the heat. Now they’re fortified and cleaned, the bells’ ringing mechanism updated, and the great organ (set between the bell towers on the west side) restored. A team that includes specialists from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) has worked diligently to return the cathedral’s much-lauded acoustics.
