NotreDame: The story behind the towering spire and the man who built it
Paris - The statues floated across the sky like ghosts, headless as they hovered above Paris one by one on the morning of April 11. Bearing the likeness of the 12 apostles and symbols of the four evangelists, they were dislodged from the base of the 90-meter-tall Notre Dame de Paris spire by crane, carefully lowered to the ground, and then herded into the bed of a truck.
"I'm completely nauseated," Olivier Baumgartner, who was working on the spire restoration project, told the New Yorker on Monday. But not everyone loved Viollet-le-Duc's architectural philosophy, Murray said. He had a peculiar vision: To him, restoring the cathedral didn't mean merely making it look like it used to; it meant restoring it to a state that the original architects perhaps dreamed of achieving - but never could. He wanted to fulfill a vision that, in the course of centuries, had never been completed, Murray said. And to some critics, this was presumptuous, even egotistical, Hearn wrote.
Viollet-le-Duc didn't view the Gothic architecture as merely a fashionable design, Murray said, but rather as an indelible part of France's national identity.
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