With a modern (lighter than lead) roof cladding material I think that steel would be the best (most practrical) structural material for the roof truss system. Yes, a titanium alloy would be lighter and stronger for the weight but even with billions of dollars it just doesn’t make sense to me.
That could in itself be a contemporary chapel 
.
@RTCool At first glance that framing looks remarkably modern. Only after I read the Wiki article did I realize it was built in the mid-1800s. Thanks for posting it.
My camera has a better memory than I do. I found my Ektachrome slide from being there in 1981, and sure enough, that’s what the framing is like.
Way down at the end almost looks like a modern library, I can almost see books on the inward sloping wrap around shelving. Now that’ll be stuck in my head until some day when I have free time to draw a library. I sometimes envy people who just get songs stuck in their head.
In grad school, I was tasked with measuring and drawing the cast iron, wrought iron and glass block floor book stacks of the Furness Library. It was a pretty interesting bunch of Tinker Toy like parts. I can’t seem to find any images of the stacks themselves on the web to point to.
Notre Dame, no insurance, low fire protection. Should this country have nuclear power plants?
3 Likes
If the catholic church doesn’t want to insure their belongings or spend money on fire protection, why do you want to blame the country of france for that??
I would say: let the pope pay for the rebuild of his property and spend those hundreds of millions on the homeless people in Paris. Probably enough for all homeless people in France…
i wonder if you should have internet access
The government of France owns Notre Dame along with 69 other churches across the country.
Governments act as insurance companies - they have contingencies for these type of risks.
Personal opinions about some institutions is one thing, but uninformedness should make oneself doubt whether to have a strong opinion about it.
The problem of “richness” of immovables (be it owned by church or state, as in case of France) is that you may not have enough financial richness to cover the cost of maintenance.
In other countries it took decades and huge controversy to collect 500m€ for rebuilding a questionable symbol of monarchy (not democracy). Despite of the symbolic importance of Notre Dame, that four times this amount can be set free with ease within two days is really worrying. So I totally agree with you, if the donors showed the responsibility to give even a fraction of that amount to solve social problems, we would live in a better world.
Sorry for assuming that the Notre Dame is owned by the catholic church, in many cases they are owned by them.
I believe that the catholic church has more than enough resources to rebuild the Notre Dame and then some…
In several articles I’ve read about the roof of Notre Dame, I’ve seen
it referred to as “The Forest”.
But I’ve seen the “forest” reference in other descriptions of cathedral roofs.
Thanks to @GSTUDIOS posting this awesome link Mapping Gothic I can certainly understand it.
This is an image from the " Amiens, Cathédrale Notre-Dame", but I assume as it was started in 1220 AD the framing might have been similar.