As the embers cool and donations mount to rebuild the fire-wracked Notre Dame, lessons gleaned from the improbable reconstruction of Dresden’s Frauenkirche decades after the city was firebombed near the end of WWII could both inform and inspire the effort.
“I think the hardest part in Paris is going to be finding enough artisans with the right skills to be able to do the job at Notre Dame,” said Martin Curbach, director of the Institute of Concrete Structures at the TU Dresden University, who also was on the building committee for the Frauenkirche reconstruction, which had a total price tag of $200 million, including government funding. “Finding oak won’t be as difficult as finding the craftsmen.
Professor Stephan Albrecht, a monument expert and art historian at the University of Bamberg in Germany, cautions that replacing Notre Dame’s spire and sections of its roof, among other things, could be more complicated than it might seem at first glance. “It was an interesting assignment working without blueprints and what also made it challenging was trying to incorporate as many of the original stones and elements as possible into the new building,” Hertenstein said.
“It wasn’t always possible to find a way to comply with current building codes and practices in rebuilding an 18th century church,” he recalled. “Sometimes we had to include modern ingredients to the mixture.
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