Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

They let my father go back to his apartment, which is totally undamaged, thank God, who for some reason is more wrathful with his faithful than with my father. No damage, no smoke. The wind was blowing West.

He said the sight is unspeakable. I'll go over to look later today. Even if reconstructed with utmost fidelity, how long will it be before it looks anything like the way it's supposed to? Ten-fifteen years?

We're going to be walking past this every day, probably for the rest of our lives, and seeing civilization in ruins.

The only thing to do is to rebuild as faithfully, as quickly, as completely, as possible, with no resource spared. What does it say that no one's sure we can?

That somehow, deep down, we all suspect we'll screw this up--that someone will propose building it "better" and someone else will say, "What a good idea, you can't live in the past," and somehow we'll end up with something that looks like it was built by Jean Nouvel.

We'll end up with Tour Montparnasse-by-the-Seine. Because we all know that this is all we can do now. Architecture as vandalism.

It has been so long since anyone's built anything beautiful in Paris. We all worry that the ability is simply gone.

If the reconstruction is faithful, and if this reminds France that yes, it *is* capable of rebuilding the Cathedral of Notre Dame, perhaps it will have a salutary effect. Perhaps that will put an end to the architectural sacking of Paris. city-journal.org/html/architect…

Perhaps the sight of that Cathedral in ruins will shock sense into the city planners. Perhaps people will realize why beauty matters, why building in that idiom matters, that our generation has *no right* to destroy this city's beauty.

That could be one outcome.

But I fear it won't be the outcome, however obvious it is.
And I think everyone else fears it, too.