Notre Dame Paris

17.12.2020

Sayali Dabholkar
1908
Sir J J College of Architecture
Humanities
Second Year, Sem III
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Overview
Gothic architecture is light and airy. The buildings show the creativity of humans.
Architects wanted to build cathedrals where citizens could celebrate God. The
cathedrals are extremely impressive. It is almost impossible not to be in awe of these
buildings. They were meant to tell people about the possibility of heaven. Most
cathedrals are built in the shape of the cross, a symbol of Christianity.
Since the 19th century, Notre Dame has been called “The World Ambassador of
Gothic Cathedrals.” Every year thousands of people visit the cathedral. The cathedral
is located along the banks of the Seine River that runs through Paris.
Victor Hugo, a French author, wrote the famous book The Hunchback of Notre
Dame. This book tells the story of Quasimodo, a hunchback who lived in the bell tower
of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Completed in 1345, Notre Dame means “our
lady” in French. It is one of the most famous Catholic cathedrals in the world. Victor
Hugo’s book helped make the cathedral famous worldwide. He called cathedrals
“books in stone.” He thought that these buildings had much to teach and many stories
to tell.
The most recognizable features of Gothic architecture are flying buttresses and
huge archways. Architects wanted to let as much sunlight stream into the cathedral as
possible. That way beautiful stained-glass windows could line the sides of the cathedral.
However, the architects wanted to build high walls as well. They needed to figure out
how to support high walls with very little stone.
Arches and vaulting were one answer. An arch is a very strong shape that can
support a lot of weight, and vaulting means to construct arched ceilings. Flying
buttresses were the other solution. They are arches that stick out on the outside of the
church to help support the weight of the thick stone roofs and the ceilings inside
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Notre Dame
The Notre-Dame de Paris was constructed in the fourth arrondissement
(district) of the French capital. This structure is considered to be one of the
finest and one of the original examples of French Gothic Architecture. This
cathedral houses some of the most important relics in all of Christendom
such as the fragment of the Cross of Christ and the Crown of Thorns.

Medieval architecture: Emmanuel Viollet-le Duc

Emmanuel Viollet-le Duc presented four schematic plans that, seen in sequence,
project a dynamic theory of medieval architecture. In the first plan two parallel lines
of small circles run inside two continuous bands; one is invited to think of the slender
columns and thin outer walls of a wooden-roofed Roman or Early Christian basilica.
In the second (hypothetical) basilica the weight and thrust of masonry vaults has
necessitated thickened walls and supports. In the third, the vaults are supported by
compound piers and thick exterior walls reinforced with buttresses. The fourth is seen
to be radically different. It is as if the exterior wall had been broken into segments
and each segment rotated through ninety degrees to provide the potential for a
series of rigid external props capable of bearing arched struts (flying buttresses) to
receive the lateral thrust of high vaults. The result was the potential for a kind of a
tall, fully vaulted superstructure that could be supported (apparently) on slender
interior supports. This was truly a revolution in the art of building. It was a revolution
that depended on foresight, or anticipation. Thus, the structural requirements of the
superstructure are anticipated by the radically new forms of the infrastructure.
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The cathedral began construction around 1155 A.D. with ambitions of being the
tallest structure in all of France. The keystone has a height of 33 meters (108 ft) and a
steeper timber roof structure than most buildings at the time, which became
problematic with wind pressures at such high altitude. The height of the structure
coupled with the design needed an effective solution to transmit lateral loads down
to the foundation system.
It was in the twelfth century nave of Notre-Dame of Paris that took this leap. The rib-
vaulted system of construction is inscribed in this remarkable monument. “Notre-
Dame was, in fact, conceived and built entirely without flying buttresses; that flyers
are not even necessary for the structural integrity of such an edifice. Flying
buttresses, it is alleged, were added only in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—
principally as a means to evacuate the rainwater from the high roof along the
gutters set in their crests.
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The exposed external arch or "flying buttress" springing from the vertical entity that the
French call a culée. The question at the Parisian cathedral begins in its lower parts as a
powerful buttress, absorbing the weight and thrust of the aisle vaults but then above the
level of the roofs of the aisle and chapels it is projected upward as a freestanding support
(culée) to launch a single arched strut clear across the eleven-to-twelve-meter space of
the double aisles to butt against the clerestory. We might invoke the duality of purpose in
the massive upright through the use of the descriptive phrase exterior buttress-support. The
contrefort anticipates the existence of the culée and the flyer. This true both physically,
since the one is built on top of the other, seems to grow out of it

This inherent ambiguity has led to the formulation of widely divergent views on the history
of the flying buttress and the architectural character of the cathedral of Notre-Dame as it
was first constructed in the twelfth century. Certain archaeologists maintain that flying
buttresses were already in use in the early twelfth century at Sens Cathedral and perhaps
even at Abbot Suger's St-Denis and elsewhere, while others have resisted the idea that
flyers were used before the construction of the nave of Notre-Dame in the period
between the 1170s and the early thirteenth century (Marcel Aubert, Jean Bony, Robert
Branner, William Clark, Robert Mark). The very existence of such a radical disagreement
suggests that the grounds of the argument need to be redefined, that the debate needs
to be located more clearly within the changing climate of the thought of our own time,
and the monuments themselves re-examined with new questions and a new degree of
rigor. Whereas the internal supports (columns and responds) of Notre-Dame are
articulated with their bases, columns, and capitals conceived according to the classical
canons formed in antiquity and perpetuated and transformed through the Middle Ages,
in the exterior buttress-supports of the nave, functional-looking rectangular masses elbow
rudely outward and upward from the body of the edifice, dissolving its exterior mass into
broken planes.
It is certainly true that historical circumstances have conspired to render the innovative
exterior space frame at Notre-Dame quite invisible. Thus, in cathedral (as also in many
other churches) the generous pockets of exterior space created through the projection of
the exterior buttress-supports, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, have been pulled
into the interior of the edifice through the construction of the lateral chapels that now
lend a smooth, screen like periphery. Inside the cathedral one is equally unaware of the
presence of the massive units, since they are perceived only as the dividing walls
between chapels. It is very hard to gauge their thickness or to assess the vital structural
role that they play in the support of the superstructure. It is only at the level of the aisle
and gallery roofs and in distant views that the role of the massive exterior buttress-supports
can be appreciated.
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Missing elements of the west facade

sculptural program were replaced; a
new steeple constructed; a version of
the "original" four-story elevation
concocted in the bays around the
central crossing; chapels and windows
reworked; chapel and gallery vaults
rebuilt; transept facades
reconstructed; the interior refitted and
new paint work; and, the flying
buttresses and uprights rebuilt with
significant changes that transformed
their appearance. The little
tabernacles atop the great exterior
buttress-supports around the nave, for
example, are a fiction invented by the
nineteenth-century restorers of the
cathedral.

Double-tiered nave flyers in the form of

a quarter circle (quadrant) with inner
and outer units at sharply different
levels. In 1962 Robert Branner
addressed the structural design of the
Parisian cathedral in relation to the
form of the flying buttresses at Bourges Cathedral (the Gothic construction at Bourges
began in the 1190s, as the Notre-Dame choir was completed and the nave was under
construction). Branner believed that the present configuration in the nave of Notre-Dame,
where the flyers ascend in a single line from the exterior buttress arches, but with each
flight at a different level, rather than with a continuous register extending from the
clearstory out to tall exterior butts.... Since the existing "tall exterior butts" at Notre-Dame
were not necessary to his proposed structural system, it is not surprising to find that Branner
felt free to remove them, claiming that they did not belong to the original twelfth-century
structure at all and that they were merely thirteenth-century additions. Robert Branner's
understanding of twelfth-century Notre Dame was developed in consultation with Jean
Bony. Bony to offer a graphic reconstruction of the twelfth-century flyers in an entirely new
form. Among the drawings of Notre Dame in its pre restoration state, there exists in the
Bibliothèque du Patrimoine a sketch of a masonry spur situated on the west side of the
south transept façade. The spur incorporates a relieving arch that allows the wall to be
reduced in thickness in the area of
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the gallery window below. In the relieving arch, according to Bony "the original angle of
the buttress of the transept is preserved."

The idea of the two-tiered system was also embraced by William Clark and Robert Mark.
Thus, in their reconstructed nave of Notre Dame we find a quadrant arch (forming a
quarter circle) springing from a shallow exterior buttress support, hopping over the space
of the outer aisle to support the gallery vault. A second arch, of identical design, springs
from an upright rising from gallery wall; bridging the space of the inner aisle/gallery, it
butts against the clerestory. In a structural sense, they argue, the arches would behave
separately. Thus, whereas in Viollet-le-Duc's reconstruction and in the present building, the
thrust of the main vault would be delivered in a single straight line to the massive exterior
buttress-support in the new reconstruction this same thrust is delivered by the inner flyer to
the intermediary supports between the aisles. It should be remembered that these are
slender cylindrical columns having a diameter of about 0.92 meter. They carry not only
the vaults of the aisles but also the weight of the gallery above.

The profile of the cross section of the Notre-Dame de Paris was relatively not an
elaborate design compared to the cathedrals of that time. The design of the
flying buttresses did not have any interior openings or profiles that deviated from
a clean arc shape.

Conclusion
Notre Dame is a revolution in the designs of cathedrals and an epitome in the era it was
built. The structure is especially interesting in its debate over structural system through
centuries. It was severely damaged in a fire and work of its restoring is on so it becomes
more exiting to known how real it can stand again.
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