PARIS – A refurbishment of the area around Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris will open it up to the Seine River and help ease the flow of millions of visitors, while also mitigating the effects of climate change, city officials said on Monday.
Notre-Dame, which was hit by a devastating fire in 2019, has been closed to visitors and is still being rebuilt, with plans to partially reopen in 2024, just in time for the Paris Olympics.
The restrained redesign of the area around Notre-Dame, which leaves the long, rectangular stone square in front of the cathedral mostly intact, will not radically change the neighborhood. But Paris officials said the planned changes would improve visitors’ experience and make the city more resilient in the face of rising temperatures.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told a news conference on Monday that Notre-Dame “should be left in its beauty and everything around it should be a showcase for that beauty.”
But, she added, “a city like ours can no longer think outside of climate change.”
The redesign aims to remove fences to expand and merge parks around Notre-Dame, to make neighboring streets more pedestrian-friendly and to plant more than 30 percent more vegetation in the area, including trees to provide additional shade. Plans also require that a parking lot currently under the cathedral’s main square be converted into an underground walkway that opens onto the banks of the Seine and provides access to a welcoming center and an archeological museum, officials said.
The new design includes a cooling system that will allow a five millimeter thin sheet of water (about a fifth of an inch) to flow in the square in front of the cathedral during heat waves, enough to lower temperatures by a few degrees without to flood. the area – and to give tourists a glittering backdrop for their photos, officials added.
The City Hall of Paris will pay for the project, with a budget of 50 million euros, or $ 53 million.
The area would reopen in 2024, when most of the cathedral’s reconstruction is scheduled to end, so worshipers can use the space again. But the renovation of the cathedral’s suburbs will not begin in earnest until the site is free of scaffolding and building bungalows, and it is not expected to be completed until 2027.
The city organized an international architecture and landscape competition for the redesign, with city officials, the Diocese of Paris and the task force in charge of Notre-Dame’s reconstruction acting as juries. The city also organized a six-month consultation with local residents and businesses, and a commission of 20 randomly selected citizens provided input.
The winning team is led by Bas Smets, a Belgian landscape architect, and includes GRAU, a French architectural and urban studio, and Neufville-Gayet, a French architectural firm.
Mr. Smets said the square in front of the cathedral was meant to be a “clearing” surrounded by trees, highlighting Notre-Dame’s famous western façade, creating new views of the Seine, and providing respite from rising temperatures.
“By working on wind, shade and moisture, we can create a microclimate around the cathedral that increases the city’s resilience and prepares it for an uncertain climate future,” he said.
Ms Hidalgo, who was first elected in 2014, has promised to transform Paris into a greener city by drastically reducing the number of cars circulating in the heart of the French capital and increasing the number of cycle lanes.
Jean XXIII Square, a park behind the cathedral that is currently fenced, will be opened, with new lawns stretching to the edge of the Île de la Cité, the island on the Seine where the cathedral is. The park will also be merged with the gardens that run along the southern edge of the cathedral, creating a 1,300-foot-long green space where visitors will be able to admire the cathedral’s flying pillars and stained glass windows.
Approximately 13 million tourists visit Notre-Dame each year before the fire, in long haphazard lines in front and crowded in narrow streets around it.
Rev. Gilles Drouin, an adviser to the archbishop of Paris, said at the news conference on Monday that the aim was to “decompartmentalize spaces that limit it somewhat.”
“I am very happy that the tragedy of the fire will enable us to recreate physical and symbolic ties between the capital and its urban environment,” said Father Drouin.
The 2019 fire destroyed the latticework of large, antique woodwork that made up Notre-Dame’s attic, where the fire originated, melted the roof’s lead sheath and the overall stability of the iconic stone structure that stood for eight centuries. Endangered. Molten metal, flaming beams and the spire fell inside the cathedral, causing further damage.
A definite cause of the fire may never be determined; the leading theories are an electrical short circuit or a cigarette thrown away by a worker in the attic.
Last year, the building was stabilized, and restoration and reconstruction work is now underway, in line with President Emmanuel Macron’s ambitious promise to reopen the cathedral by 2024. The cathedral’s organ is being cleaned, and 1,000 oak trees have been cut down across the country for reconstruction. the spire and the attic.
Mr. Macron abandoned the idea of replacing the cathedral’s 19th-century spire with a contemporary one, but plans to modernize the interior of the building were given the green light in December.
The fire also contaminated the cathedral site with clouds of toxic dust and exposed nearby schools, day care centers, public parks and other parts of Paris to alarming levels of lead, forcing French authorities to impose and shut down disinfection measures at the construction site. down and clean the area several times.
Advocacy groups have filed lawsuits claiming that the authorities have failed to address lead contamination risks, but those concerns have mostly disappeared from public view in recent months, and the cathedral’s roofing is expected to be rebuilt with lead.