Rebuilding Notre-Dame

What should be done? To answer this question, the teams in charge of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, after the fire, had at their disposal scattered data, sporadic studies, a diagnosis that concluded that the cathedral had stood for eight centuries... against all expectations, as well as the expertise of former journeymen carpenters, who had made models of the spire, and a providential survey of the framework carried out in 2013 by two young architects. In these conditions, the best solution was to rely on what had worked, without changing anything in the building. For the architects, the reconstruction work then took a particular turn: it was a matter of starting from the result and finding the solutions to achieve it, mobilising the engineers to go beyond the initial calculations in order to understand why the cathedral was holding up, and the craftsmen to reappropriate the traditional techniques.