The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (33 page)

V
IOLLET PREPARED A
drawing of the sanctuary of the cathedral as he imagined it had been when Quasimodo and Esmeralda had haunted it. Napoleon’s throne was cast out, and the temple to Philosophy vanished. The yellowed distemper that covered the stone was stripped away. At the heart of the sanctuary he sketched a Gothic altar, covered in beaten copper and studded with gems. It was as if four centuries had never happened.

And then the drawing was set into practice. The scenery of Louis XIV’s baroque sanctuary was pried away, and behind it was revealed a ring of pointed Gothic arches that matched those of the nave. Viollet ordered his workmen to scrape away all the eighteenth-century whitewash, and soon walls that had appeared to be made of nothing more substantial than painted pasteboard took on the weight and the integrity of stone.

Viollet prepared another drawing, presenting the west front of Notre Dame as he imagined it had been before the revolutionaries had destroyed its statuary. Then he set his masons to work to restore to their original habitations all the disappeared inhabitants of that great city of God, from the angels and the saints to the vilest of the gargoyles. The west front became once more an image of the medieval universe itself, “that divine creation,” as Hugo wrote, “whose twin characteristics of variety and eternity it seems to have purloined.”

Viollet’s most difficult problem, however, was what to do with the flying buttresses and the tall clerestory windows of the nave. These had not been part of the original conception of bishop de Sully, so they presented Viollet with a choice. He could remove all traces of any later, lighter design, restoring the cathedral to the state intended by Sully. Alternatively, he could leave the buttresses intact and repair the building in its altered form.

Viollet chose neither option. Instead, he adopted an ingenious strategy: he invented a design that combined, for practical and archaeological advantages, the various different states of the cathedral from its long course of construction. He retained the thirteenth-century improvements—the
arcs boutants
and tall clerestories—around the entire nave and apse except for the areas around the crossing. In the bays that adjoined the crossing he reinstated Sully’s original scheme, with large expanses of solid wall pierced by small windows. The bays rebuilt according to Sully’s design were symmetrically disposed around the center of the cathedral, lending it both literal and visual strength, drawing the building together toward its heart. Above the crossing, Viollet replaced the spire that had been torn down in the revolution, further reinforcing the symmetry of the composition and further suggesting that the building was complete and whole, a virgin.

N
OTRE
D
AME HAD
never been whole before. There never had been an original, completed state to which it could be restored. The Notre Dame that Viollet-le-Duc finished in 1864 was an attempt to fix a moving target in time, and archaeologists and historians still lament the restoration as they attempt to untangle the story of the cathedral. Despite his best efforts, Viollet’s work was less an operation of historical science than a romantic fiction, an allegory, a manifesto that destroyed as much as it preserved.

Of this, Viollet himself was quite aware. “The term
restoration
and the thing itself are both modern,” he wrote. “To restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair, or rebuild it; it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness that could never have existed at any given time.”

John Ruskin, the celebrated English art critic, was appalled, describing restoration as “a destruction accompanied by the false description of the thing destroyed.” If Notre Dame was the work of centuries, there was no particular scientific reason to strip away the contribution of the eighteenth century, say, rather than any other. Removing those layers that former ages had deemed necessary to add to a building was a violation of their trust in posterity. And restoring the things that had been taken away was also a crime, for it falsely pretended to resurrect the obsolete societies that had originally made them. As Ruskin’s disciple William Morris commented, “Surely it is a curious thing that we are ready to laugh at the idea of the possibility of the Greek workman turning out a Gothic building, or a Gothic workman turning out a Greek one, but we see nothing preposterous in the Victorian workman producing a Gothic one.”

Ruskin proposed a much more radical strategy. Do nothing, he said, or rather do as little as possible. “Watch an old building with an anxious care; guard it as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation . . . bind it together with iron where it loosens; stay it with timber where it declines; do not care about the unsightliness of the aid.” Morris was even more radical: “If it has become inconvenient for its present use . . . raise another building rather than alter or enlarge the old one.”

“We understand the rigour of these principles,” Viollet retorted,
“and we accept them completely: but only when we are dealing with a curious ruin, without a future or an actual use.” Notre Dame de Paris was no curious ruin, but the chief temple of the most advanced nation on earth. She had been desecrated amid the disasters of the revolution, those years of tumult that divided the ancient from the modern regime; and just as it had proved necessary to restore the monarchy, so was it necessary to restore the seat of its religious authority.

But just as the restored monarchy (and then the Second Empire) was nothing like the ancien régime, so the restored Notre Dame was no copy of the original. It was a very nineteenth-century romance, a manifesto of the modern rather than the medieval era. “Gothic construction . . . is supple, free, and as enquiring as the modern spirit,” Viollet had written, and he pressed the architects of his own day to be as inventive as the masons of Notre Dame.

To Viollet, Gothic architecture
was
modern architecture: he prophesied buildings whose luminosity and thinness would rival the stained-glass filigree of the clerestories of Notre Dame, whose rigorous structural logic would be inspired by the vaults and the flying buttresses of medieval masons. His Notre Dame de Paris was every bit as typical of the Paris of the nineteenth century as the Galeries Lafayette and the engineered glass roofs of the Gare d’Orsay.

It is ironic that some of the Communards chose to vent their fury on the cathedral in 1871. If they required a monument to reason and progress and all the rest of it, they only had to look around them at the vaults and buttresses of Notre Dame.

In Which the Prophecies of the Future Are Fulfilled

R
EMEMBER
T
OMORROW
Fake magazine cover created by Joshua Bolchover and Shumon Basar
for an exhibition about the Hulme Crescents in 2004
.

Lord Byron wished that the dilettanti and the scholars of his time would leave the Parthenon to die alone. Now his wish is coming true. The building is melting into air, and all the restoration and conservation in the world can only postpone its disappearance.

Restoration was, as Viollet-le-Duc pointed out, an entirely modern approach to old buildings. It was founded in a consciousness that the past, having been detached from the present by historic upheaval, was a legitimate object of disinterested study. The generation of architects who succeeded Viollet (and saw him as a prophet of modernity) turned his methods back to front: they wrote histories of what was still to come, documenting the future with the same rigor that their nineteenth-century forebears had devoted to the investigations of bygone days. It was as if Thomas Cole’s architect, reclining on his column, had turned away from the monuments of Egypt, Greece, and Rome to dream instead about splendors yet to be built.

In the timeless dream of the architect, all ages appear simultaneous before him; but in the waking world, each generation supplants the ones before it, only to be supplanted by others in turn. The realization of the avant-garde utopias of modernism involved the destruction of everything that had preceded them; yet soon these new worlds became old themselves, ready to be devoured by other visions.

The Hulme
*
Crescents in Manchester were just such a utopia
once, the fulfillment of modernist prophecy; and alone among all the buildings in this book, they have now passed away. Today they are just memories, preserved behind screens of liquid crystal. Logging on to scattered Web sites, the Crescents’ former residents swap stories about what the future was like, once upon a time.

*
Pronounced hume.

Hello, good evening, and welcome to Hulme, Manchester, Great Britain! It is my immense honour to say to all you slum dwellers: your prayers have been answered. Welcome to Paradiiiiise!

I
T’S MARCH 1993
, and it certainly doesn’t look like paradise. Peering into darkness, the video camera finds no purchase in the light that flickers over burning grass. A hooded procession emerges from the flames, and the lens zooms in on a vacant face crudely daubed in black and white, animated, if by anything at all, only by a mixture of pity and contempt. A strangled cry pierces the night as a solitary muffled drum beats out a doleful march.

Then the solemn scene explodes into flashing strobes and thrashing music, and the slum dwellers of the Hulme Crescents burst into dance. Searchlights bring a vast building into focus: sliding flashes of stained concrete, glittering shards of glass, and dully gleaming security fences. A white sheet has been hung across the front of this building, stretching from the roof to the ground, and at the top of this shroud a small group of people is struggling with some unwieldy object.

One by one the searchlights move into position; the beat intensifies, and so does the roar of the crowd. The spectral figures gather at the parapet and briefly hold still. Then they all move in concert, pushing their burden—a small white car—to the edge of the roof. It teeters there for a moment, and then the concrete parapet shatters. The car falls past the screen, so slowly that it might be sinking in water. The crowd roars and rushes forward, the mob submerging the wreck under their bodies. They scarcely notice the explosions in the air above them.