Notre-Dame de Paris Prepares to Reopen After a Monumental Reconstruction

Philippe Villeneuve, Rémi Fromont, and Pascal Prunet, chief architects for French historic monuments, have supervised the reconstruction, executed by close to 250 firms from a wide range of fields, among them carpentry, stained glass, and metalwork. Especially prized were masters of medieval crafts, such as hand-hewing oak beams with axes for the cathedral’s roughly 300-foot-long roof.

Engineers stabilized and secured the edifice’s exterior, including its elegant flying buttresses; masons used 35,000 cubic feet of limestone to replace what had been marred; specialized teams gently cleaned walls and statues, at times with lasers, to remove soot; art conservationists repaired paintings damaged by smoke and water; and woodworkers re-created the original oak roof structure, known as la forêt, or the forest, by installing a roughly 300-foot-long tangle of beams made from 1,000 trees from across France. New safety measures include fire walls, state-of-the-art alarms, and sprinklers with a misting system to reduce water impact.

Notre-Dame’s towers, with their famed gargoyles and 10 bells, were largely untouched directly by the fire, but they suffered from the heat. Now they’re fortified and cleaned, the bells’ ringing mechanism updated, and the great organ (set between the bell towers on the west side) restored. A team that includes specialists from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) has worked diligently to return the cathedral’s much-lauded acoustics.

The reconstruction process has yielded fresh perspectives on the Gothic masterpiece, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Historians found that during the time of Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the architect responsible for the cathedral’s 19th-century restoration, much of the stone was painted. “Red, green, blue—really powerful colors,” reflects Bas Smets, the Belgian landscape architect who is overseeing the redesign of the surrounding esplanades and gardens, slated for completion in 2028, and has visited the cathedral’s interiors. “We always thought of churches to be stone, but the colors are, like, wow.” Same with Notre-Dame’s famed rose windows, which have been expertly cleaned and mended. “They are so bright,” Smets says. “You will see volume like you couldn’t see before—a whole new experience.”

There will be contemporary touches too, such as new vestments designed for the reopening ceremonies by French fashion designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac and, come 2026, six new stained-glass windows on the south aisle of the nave—a suggestion by Archbishop Ulrich as a way to signify, with beauty, the post-fire restoration. As with many such Notre-Dame proposals, the windows received fierce pushback—France’s Commission Nationale du Patrimoine et de L’Architecture (CNPA) unanimously rejected them, but the Ministry of Culture overruled it.