Notre Dame Cathedral will be rebuilt just the way it stood before last year’s devastating fire.
To stay historically accurate, it will again be built with potentially toxic lead.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who wants Notre Dame reopened in time for the 2024 Olympics, had initially pushed for a contemporary touch on top of the cathedral, prompting eye-catching proposals from architects around the world.
French firefighters tackle the fire at Notre Dame cathedral (Benoit Moser/Pompiers de Paris/PA)
But Mr Macron came around to the traditionalists’ argument and approved reconstruction plans for the 12th-century monument that were presented on Thursday, according to a statement from the state agency overseeing the project.
The plan includes recreating the 19th-century spire by Viollet Le Duc that collapsed in the fire, and “favours fidelity to the monument’s form and restoration of the cathedral in its latest state”, the statement said.
That means the state Notre Dame was in the afternoon of April 15 2019, before a fire broke out beneath its roof, toppling its spire, consuming the roof and threatening the rose-windowed twin towers that keep the cathedral upright.
More than a year later, the structure remains unstable.
Notre Dame before the blaze (Andrew Matthews/PA)
It took nearly a year to clear out dangerous lead residue released in the fire and to get to the point where workers could start removing scaffolding that had been in place before the fire for a previous renovation effort.
Actual reconstruction will not start until next year.
The reconstruction plan says it will replicate original materials “to guarantee the authenticity, harmony and coherence of this masterpiece of Gothic art”.
Those materials originally include tons of lead, which is raising concerns among health and environmental groups.
Toxic lead spewed by the fire forced schools in the area to close and prompted a lengthy, painstaking cleanup effort of the historic neighbourhood on an island in the centre of Paris.
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