>>Good morning and welcome to Global Perspectives.

On April 15th, 2019, a fire damaged and nearly destroyed the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

Today we are joined by Dr. Jennifer Feltman of the University of Alabama, who is working on the restoration of that cathedral, which is a U.N. World Heritage site.

Among other things.

Welcome to the show.

>>Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

>>So, Jennifer, you're from Alabama.

Originally, you went to Florida Florida State for your for graduate school.

>>That's right.

>>How did you end up working on Notre Dame Cathedral?

One of the most notable buildings in the world.

>>It really has been an opportunity of a lifetime and just really something unexpected.

But it's a trajectory.

When I look back at the path or the past, I see the path.

In graduate school, I began studying Gothic architecture and sculpture and began working on some major monuments, including Notre Dame.

I wrote a dissertation.

It included material on Notre Dame, and then I spent more than a decade working on another cathedral, the Cathedral of France, or in Champagne, Reims.

As some people say in English, that cathedral project or that.

That research project led me to work with several French collaborators who ultimately one of those became a connection that invited me to be a part of this research working group.

>>So your project is called Notre Dame in Colors.

>>That's right.

So there's a project that I've been developing as a member of the Research Working Group for the Restoration of Notre Dame, called Notre Dame in Color.

It focuses on what pigments were used on stone sculptures, whether we believe it or not or realize it or not, the sculptures on the exterior of the building were brightly colored.

They were bright blues, reds, and sometimes even gold leaf was used.

These exist today in very, very small fragments.

On the stone, chemists have been studying them and keeping documentation since the 1970s.

They were not destroyed in the fire, but the occasion of the fire has allowed researchers to be involved in a very intimate way with the with the work site and to give us the impetus to document the cathedral further.

What we plan to do with the Notre Dame in Color project is to both analyze what is there, try to determine what is medieval, what is post-medieval, and then I'm working with a team of digital specialists and archeological specialists to recreate pigments in digital form.

This involves both painting in real form and then also translating that digital form to or that that into a digital form on 3D models.

>>So I want to talk a little more about about the work itself, because it is just what you you just explained in short form, you know, brings a whole bunch of questions to light.

>>Yeah.

>>But before we get there, I just wanted you to describe kind of the magnitude of the damage you saw first.

So you have the fire on April 15, 2019.

Two days later, French President Macron says we're going to rebuild this in five years.

And here we are five years later, it is scheduled to reopen in December, I believe.

>>That's right.

>>2024.

You've had something like $928 million donated by 340,000 people around the world because this is obviously one of the most recognizable buildings in the world, one of the most recognizable skylines in the world.

So you show up there.

What do you see?

>>Well, the first time I was able to go was this was in the context of COVID.

2021, September of 2021.

It was it was a sad time, in part because we were also living through COVID.

The Arc de Triomphe is wrapped, and there's this kind of somber feeling in Paris.

There aren't many tourists because people aren't traveling.

Then I come up out of the metro station at the Ile de la Cite.

I look up at the skyline and to see the cathedral without the spire was really gut wrenching.

I think that was the first moment that I truly like palpably felt sadness.

At the same time, I the next day I met with my research working group and we met on the site for the first time.

We went through all the process of getting on the special suits you wear on the site, and I met people who were doing the restoration and every single person was filled with a sense of pride and mission.

And I really think that it's the kind of palpable sense of we are rebuilding Notre Dame, the people, not myself, but the the people who were involved with the the project, the craftspeople on the site.

That sense is in part what has led us to be able to finish it in five years.

It's also been very strictly governed and managed very efficiently under the establishment public, which is the organization in charge of the restoration.

>>So you had described when we were off camera that this is, you know, very much a French project and obviously is a source of considerable pride for French citizens.

But it's also a world project.

>>Absolutely, yes.

>>How many international scientists and artisans and artists and historians are working on this project?

>>That is a great question.

I don't know that I have a number on the top of my head.

I can say I'm the only American on the research working group that I'm a part of.

There's another German scholar so that there's two amongst a smaller group of 14.

Maybe there's a Englishman as well who's a part of another research group, but by and large, it's mostly French citizens.

On site I've encountered one American who was working to paint some of the stones on the interior, just lightly touching what she called the mustache, which is where the Stones beat together in the mortar, might squish out a little bit and look unseemly.

They were making it rather smooth and even on the interior.

But she wasn't necessarily working there because she's American.

She's working there because she's a specialist in this in that field.

And she was already a part of a workshop.

Similarly, I'm not necessarily working on Notre Dame because I'm an American per se, but because my specialty is Gothic architecture and sculpture and had been working in France.

That said, I do think there is a sense of the connection between the United States in America that I have felt palpably as well, and being a part of this project.

And we've also had for our project the Notre Dame and Color Project support from the Face Foundation, which is partnered with the French Embassy in the United States today.

I believe they've changed the name to the Villa Albertine.

That's really helped to establish what they call the Transatlantic Research Partnership between my university, the University of Alabama and Sorbonne University, where my co-PI and I have been working together on the project.

>>It's really unbelievable because you're talking about this building and very intricate things.

You're talking about painting, very small things.

You're doing 3D mapping of sculptures.

Before we get into some of the minutia of what you're actually doing.

One question that is there's really, you know, stuck to me is like, where do you get started on a project like this?

You have to break it down, obviously, into parts, different people working on different things.

How is it is it a cohesive team you see?

>>Are you speaking of the arc, the architectural team and the reconstruction or the research teams?

Both.

And how do they work together?

>>Yeah, so that's a whole that's a great question.

So on the one hand you have the establishment public, which is really in charge of the restoration, and it is under the purview of the French government.

It's informed by the ministry of Culture.

There's also financial oversight.

And they're the ones with the the financial, you know, the donations that they manage, that there's a very strict accounting and auditing process as well that's totally separate from the researchers.

And but but it does involve, you know, paying for bidding out projects.

So people they would be if we need carpentry, the charpente, the wood, this would be built out who's going to fashion it, Who's going to be the carpenters working who are going to be the Masons?

What workshops?

That's all handled through that organization.

And with any complex reconstruction campaign, France already has the processes in place because they have many, many historic monuments.

So underneath the monument historic, the organization is a part of the Ministry of Culture.

There are regional areas with heads over those regions.

Jonathan Triet is the head over this particular region with Notre Dame and in essence they work with the chief architects, the head architects in charge, who are already trained in restoring and maintaining historic monuments.

And we should keep in mind that Notre Dame's current architect, Philip Villeneuve, and the other architects, Pascal Prunet and Remi Fromont were already involved in the restoration when the fire happened, and then they continued to rebuild afterward.

>>Which leads me to my next question, because you're talking about restoring Notre Dame.

Are you trying to restore 2019 or to 1919 or any date previous?

>>Right.

So the question of restoration, preservation, conservation, this is obviously a major question.

And any any any historic monument.

There is a council that oversees that or informs the different committees.

It's called ICOMOS, the International Council on Monuments and Sites.

And the Venice Charter essentially lays out principles which should be followed.

And one of the major principles is if we know what was there, then we should put that back if we know exactly what was lost.

In other words, we should replace it as faithfully as we can.

It's much more of a historicising philosophy than, say, even they had in the Middle Ages where a building might burn in the Romanesque era and then they rebuild the Gothic thing.

It's a new form.

But today the mentality is restore what we lost because we knew what was there.

And there's also the sense of patrimoine or culture or cultural heritage in France that the monument accrues meaning over time, and we don't want to lose one of those aspects if possible.

The irony is we're inherently adding layers each time we do something, even the loss of it is is a layer that's missing, but it's a layer.

The readdition is another layer.

The other part of that is that because we had really precise-- >>And you're uncovering other layers you never knew existed.

>>Well, that too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So but that opens up a whole other subject because the research working groups that I was mentioning before that the official name is the Chantier Scientifique de Notre Dame.

So the the research working groups of Notre Dame, they really came about first organically as scholars who were concerned about the restoration, wanting to make sure that the historical information was consulted while the restoration happened.

There's already a scientific committee in place, so I think they were already on board with that.

But further, this was an idea that the cathedral is going to be opened up to us in ways that no cathedral really has since maybe the Cathedral of France was bombed and it also lost its roof.

So at this moment, while restoration is happening and scaffolding is all the way up, you know, the walls and the interior, we would have access to things we haven't seen before.

And I've likened this to a doctor doing an autopsy, really learning what was inside of the body, diagnosing something.

But the good news about this is the building keeps still gets to live beyond.

>>Right, right, right.

>>And so one of the things they've discovered is the very although stone seems heavy, it has light stone structure for its time period.

The walls were thinner than than some gothic buildings.

How could they withstand the weight of the roof above?

Well, it turns out they were bound together each course of stone with an iron clip.

>>And that's unique for this time period?.

>>Well, it's it's it's the earliest example, one of the earliest examples we have.

It's coming in the 13th century.

We weren't sure there was a knowledge that they existed.

But the question was, are they a later restoration where, you know, in the 19th century when Viola le Duke is doing his restoration, does he do that restoration then?

Well, we can tell because the iron had to be taken away and then it could be tested.

And they can tell the dating of the material by looking for other minerals that are included when they forged the iron.

So another scholar, Maxime L'Heritier has written published an article on that recently.

>>So explain a little about your work specifically in terms of what you're doing with the 3D imaging and sculptures.

>>Absolutely.

So the West facade, this is the main part of the building you might think of when you're walking from the front into the doors of the cathedral.

It's populated with hundreds and hundreds of intricately carved sculptures.

Interestingly, that LIDAR scan that we have and even the ones made post-fire are not precise enough to document what was there.

So if something were to happen to these sculptures at some point in the future that the knowledge of their exact form would be available to us in 2D images, but not fully available.

So one aspect is we're documenting through a process called photogrammetry.

Photogrammetry is simply a series of photos that are taken in a sequence and overlapping to capture all of the angles.

>>Every conceivable angle.

>>And then using various computer programs, we can stitch those together with at least three measurements that can give us a precision in some cases of up to .04 millimeters, which is really good.

That model can then be used with other models.

And so one of the other parts of my project is to collect fragments of Notre Dame that have been separated from the building in different periods of time.

And these happened both before the revolution and after the revolution.

Some of those happened to be in the United States.

And-- >>This is particular.

>>Yes.

>>These faces you were mentioning-- >>Yeah, the heads.

Yeah, heads of sculptures.

Yeah.

And some of them are heads that were removed by the order of the French government after the revolution.

>>So explain a little little about this for for for so our viewers know so so this these were faces that were removed from sculptures and they were stored.

>>Yes.

Well, there the whole head basically decapitated sculptures.

And if you perhaps go to the Met or Duke University has a nice collection of sculptures that some of these are part of.

And you happen to see a sculpture that looks like it's a gothic one.

It might come from Notre Dame in Paris, it may come from other places.

And many cases up until maybe the middle of the last century, we didn't know precisely or have a very good idea of where it came from.

So figuring out the provenance of these heads, they enter into American collections primarily between the World Wars or prior to World War One.

There are some before, but many of them are around the war period.

Some of them belong to Notre Dame, and we're interested in being able to document them so that we can put them together with other pieces.

In France, they also have collections of fragmented bodies that, after the revolution, sat outside of the cathedral for decades because no one cared about - because the building at that time had become a symbol of oppression to people.

And so the violence against it is an expression of that feeling.

Over time, the idea of patrimony or cultural heritage develops in France so that some of that past that's connected to oppression is removed and then it becomes a part of the collective memory of the French people.

That's when we start to see the collection move into at least some of it in the Louvre and some of it in their storage, and then eventually a museum of the Middle Ages, the Museo de Cluny in Paris.

There's also sculpture connected to that that's never been documented.

So we're getting to to document these for the first time.

>>You're documenting you're taking all these these pictures you're accumulating all this data.

And this is something you had mentioned before we were on camera as well.

There's just an enormous volume of data then coming from this whole restoration process.

What are what is that data going to be used for and who owns it if you will?

>>That's a very complicated question.

I mean, who owns it?

Depends on what the agreement say.

You know, ultimately, whoever owns the object has the right to determine the use of or to make an agreement with whomever documents it in terms of how you might use it.

So there are a couple of different places where things will be housed for all of the objects that we are documenting.

We have an agreement to be able to share them and we have an account called Sketch Fab where I can put a version that's just viewable online and you can turn the model around and look at the head.

And we may eventually make some recreations.

But again, everything's individually determined.

The material for Notre Dame is a part of a large digital project that is also one of the Chantier Scientifique working groups, is a digital working group and they are taking a 3D model of the whole cathedral and to it are adding layers and layers of data, including conservation, science data.

What what materials are being used, what historical data is out there as well?

Archival material.

And the plan for this, this is being headed up by Livio DeLuca.

He's based out of Marseilles but is a part of the CNRS, which is the National Research Center.

That's basically across the entire French country that is overseeing the project.

So I think that is going to be released later after the restoration.

It's really a matter of each working group adding material to it.

I'm hoping that some of our models will also be able to be included in that project as well.

>>The technology you're using is you couldn't have done this 15, 20 years ago, correct?

>>That's right.

So it's basically, you know, a field that that emerged out of manufacturing in some sense being able to replicate a machine part or whatnot through photogrammetry laser modeling.

We're not doing that.

This is applying a technology to cultural heritage.

So, yeah, it's it's it's really exciting to be able to do this.

>>The interface, though, between technology, history, kind of the humanities, the engineering and architecture of a building, how exciting is that to see in action, especially when you're dealing with this particular.

>>It's exciting and it's also it's challenging because you're you're basically asking different disciplines that haven't spoken to one another to then speak to one another.

And sometimes I'm working with a computer scientist who's never taken a course at all in art history or the Middle Ages.

And so I'm actually doing a lot of education through the process.

I learn things from different members of my team who are specialists in computer science programing, or maybe they're, you know, a digital modeler, but they may know nothing about what the clergy were doing in the 13th century or why this sculpture might be here or there.

So it's one of those aspects where I see the humanities really having a major role because we have a sense of studying people and why people do the things they do and when they do them.

And they became possible in that period of time also because of emerging technologies in their era.

So in some regards we are creating, recreating a kind of digital version of the cathedral interdisciplinary like they were creating the physical form in the Middle Ages, if that makes sense.

You have people trained in so many different fields kind of coming together in urban centers.

This is kind of the well, I don't want to say history of some kind of new idea emerging, but it's new things can happen when you have people from different disciplines working together, even though it's a challenge.

>>What I was I was going to ask because obviously the timing of getting Notre Dame Cathedral restored, having the skyline of Paris restored before the Olympics this this summer is noteworthy.

But but you're looking at you're setting a precedent on historic buildings.

>>I think so.

Well, I think Notre Dame is going to be kind of incapsulate a whole process that could then be applied to multiple sites in multiple areas multiple times that the digital project is is kind of fascinating in that regard.

And it is a massive amount of data, but it's also about how do you coordinate, you know, how do you bring together these different aspects both to have a physical goal of finishing something, but also to have an intellectual and scientific goal of gaining new knowledge.

And I think that's what's really special here, is that the Ministry of Culture played a role in helping that intellectual knowledge come to be.

And I think even more new things will come to light as we continue to study the cathedral, even over the next year.

>>What are some of the other historic buildings in the world, whether they're cathedrals or otherwise, that you see that the technology and the approach you're taking on this project specifically could be applied?

>>I mean, really any any monument, it would be important to document what's there.

So it's hard to say anyone specific because-- >>It works.

>>You know, in any case, any monument or small site, even where we are in Tuscaloosa, we have a very near to us Moundville, an important historic site, circa 1000 native peoples.

And that site would be a wonderful place to further document artifacts in any museum collection.

You know, this the process for documenting what I'd like to see is a standardized process as well for for not only what, for documenting objects and also for being able to access data.

And this is one of the difficult things because you do have kind of competing interests of both protecting a collection, but then also the intellectual need to make comparisons among materials.

So, you know, this is something that I'm hoping in the future we can continue to work on.

>>So tell us a little about actually working inside Notre Dame.

I mean, you have to go through a process.

Obviously, there was tons of pollution that was caused from this and exposure to the elements.

So it's a tell me a little bit.

>>Well, I mean, they went through a period initially of both stabilizing the building so that it would be safe to enter.

So before any of us were allowed on the site, that had to be completed.

In addition, that included putting in wooden framework called centering around all of the arches and then above to keep the roof or to keep the wall stable.

And after that they also had to remove tons and tons of metal that had been fused into the stone because you had all of the scaffolding in place.

When the fire happened, it melted into it and that had to be done individually.

They were specialists called Cordell East who worked literally on cords, and they were wearing very specific masks to protect them from lead dust.

The lead dust has been mitigated largely.

I don't really think that that continues to be an issue.

However, as a preventative measure, anyone who enters the site is required to wear a special suit and take a shower when you leave.

>>It's like entering a nuclear facility.

>>Oh, I don't know.

It's not quite nuclear, but but the important thing with lead is not to ingest it, right?

So you don't eat on the worksite.

Any worker who goes to the canteen takes a shower and, you know, they're everyone's, you know, safe and taken care of.

And anyone who's like consistently on the site might even have bloodwork done.

And just to make sure and all of my colleagues who've gone through that have been fine.

So, you know, I think that that that the safe the site is safe to work on.

It is a construction site.

One has to wear a helmet and that sort of thing.

But anytime a researcher has been there, it's been heavily controlled.

So we're allowed when things are not, you know, heavy construction is not happening so that we could see things for maybe an afternoon.

It's been very exciting, but limited.

>>Right, Right.

So for for tourists who are going to be visiting there in the future, obviously, this is one of the major tourist attractions in the world.

Are they going to notice any any any difference than they noticed before 2019?

Oh, well, I mean, if you if you happen to show up even this week in Paris, you might see, you know, there's there's still a fenced off area, the whole workshop, which is called the Chantier by the way.

The Chantier is enclosed and it's fortified to keep it safe and secure.

So you'll see that.

But what you'll really notice is you'll begin to see more and more of this on the skyline of Paris, the spire that first appeared in February.

It was there but behind scaffolding, but it is now mostly been covered over with lead.

And that's what they're doing now, is replacing the lead sheathing over the roof.

So the roof, I mean, if you've ever had your roof replaced at your house, you know, there-- >>Not with lead.

>>Not with lead, you've had several layers.

There's a wooden layer.

And then on top of that, usually some sort of substrate of of wood and then some kind of moisture barrier.

There are similar materials that it's not, you know, plywood.

We're working with actual trees and and all of that.

The layers are being put in place now and the top layer is lead and it's carefully it's very malleable and be easily manipulated by people who know what they're doing, people who are trained in that.

They're doing that work right now.

>>And you your-- >>Not me.

>>Your role in this, or are you writing a book or articles on this?

I know you've done a lot of interviews.

>>There'll be several there'll be several things that come out of this.

So first of all, I'm with the collaborative working group that I'm a part of.

We're organizing symposia that will happen in all places.

Kalamazoo, Michigan in May.

This is the International Congress of Medieval Studies, where our research will be presented.

I'll be organizing a book out of that as a publication, and then I plan to produce several articles.

They'll also be publications with the archeological group that focus on new discoveries.

And at some point, yes, it would be wonderful to to focus on a book project on restorations.

So I've been kind of keeping, you know, my notes in a hopper for that.

But right now, managing the grant project is, is, is-- >>Quite a challange.

>>Really a challenge is where my focus is.

I have a whole team essentially of people who I'm working with and some who are employed on the grant to do the digital modeling and recreate pigments.

So that's that's been exciting though.

The pigment recreation.

>>Jennifer Feltman, you're doing great work.

I really appreciate you joining us today and explaining a little about this exciting and really culturally important.

>>Thanks so much for having me.

>>And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again next week on another episode of Global Perspectives.