What does the fire tell us about the meaning of heritage?
Archaeologists routinely advise on the historic impacts of construction projects: but, says James Dixon, they don't engage with the public meaning of building sites. Moved by the great fire at Notre-Dame, he reflects on creation, destruction and buildings
Twitter alerted me to the burning of Notre-Dame de Paris on April 15 and I watched with a mixture of amazement and horror, with much of the world, the video clips and pictures flooding my timeline. It was not until I got home and switched to rolling television news coverage that it hit me how otherworldly the event was. Social media had shown groups of people, watching, filming, but the news cameras found something else. Groups the same size, also watching, but praying and crying on their knees in the streets as the fire, that looked as if it could only end with the complete destruction of the building, took over the skyline before them. This was an event of today, those praying were modern people, but their reaction felt like something of the past. Not from the past, not anachronistic, but like it cut
through much of what we imagine the modern world to be, back to an earlier time of more public religion, especially dramatic as it got dark and watchers became illuminated by flames.
Arguments about the various responses quickly came to dominate coverage, especially after we learned that the damage was not as bad as initially feared. Why did people care so much about this building when they seem not to care as much about people suffering elsewhere? How was so much money found so quickly to restore Notre-Dame when it was not available for other, better causes? There is a long list of such grievances and they’re all correct, as is the feeling that NotreDame should be restored, and the debate – argument really – between faithful reconstruction and modern reinterpretation rumbles on.
British Archaeology readers will have their own takes on the event, its meaning, the form of the reconstruction. You may even be involved. But what the burning of the cathedral said to me is that no building is ever as interesting a thing as when it’s either on its way up or on its way down, when it’s being created, or it’s being destroyed. We can never understand buildings without understanding those moments. Sometimes it takes a short period of trauma or violence for us to really see for ourselves what a building means. Buildings, especially those that exist at the centennial or millennial temporal scale of a cathedral, happen really slowly (many people were relieved to hear that the fallen spire was 19th century, not medieval). As horrific as a fire of this kind might be, we can use it as an opportunity to understand something different about buildings and built heritage.
The traumatic reveal
Stepping away from Paris for a moment, I can give a more prosaic parallel from closer to home. In Liverpool in January, a builder, angry at an unpaid £600 invoice, climbed into a mechanical excavator and proceeded to smash into the lobby of the Travelodge at Liverpool Innovation Park, destroying most of its fittings. A ceiling fixer whose work was among that destroyed said to the press, “The handover was today. Everything completed, we’d put the last tile in, cleaned up and made sure everything was perfect. Then some idiot in a minidigger decided to drive through the middle of the building.”
We cannot condone the criminal act here, but it’s obvious that the aggrieved builder, as he swung the digger’s bucket through the sliding doors, the strip lights and the hung ceiling of that suburban Travelodge, was creating a moment of rupture in the narrative of the perfect lobby that would otherwise have gone unremarked. Because of his action we know about the pay dispute, and we can see in the video of the aftermath all of the constituent parts of a hotel lobby, thrown together in a way we would never usually be able to observe. I’ve written about this before in the context of riot landscapes, as the archaeological equivalent of a mélange, a kind of geological shearing event
which exposes the whole history of a rock formation. The fire, the riot and the aggrieved builder tear these sites open and we can see everything inside, physical and discursive, laid out for examination.
At Notre-Dame, the building was already there. The potential for future architectural additions was there, flammability of the roof timbers was there, and so were arguments about how appropriate or inappropriate was the sense of grief or the speedy funding. Yet it is only because of that one night of trauma that we saw all of these things at once, strewn across the hotel lobby of central Paris as if a therapy group had written down their hopes and fears privately on pieces of paper, then all shouted them out at the same time.
This is such an important thing for archaeologists to address and to understand because it opens the way to new, distinctly archaeological ways of appreciating the built environment that lead us away from our reliance on the tropes of architecture and architectural history that we cling to as a discipline. Much of what we do and how we read buildings is based around structure, fabric, style – all really important for understanding what buildings are, but much less useful for understanding what they mean. Even the kinds of drawings we produce – plans, sections, elevations – replicate architects’ drawings and can only add so much to nuanced understandings of buildings as live things. New technology is starting to address this problem! Should we take an interest in the reconstruction work at Notre-Dame? Sure. Is the burned roof simply a problem to be fixed? No. It tells us more about what NotreDame means today than anything else in the recent past.
Illusion of permanence
Buildings are the most numerous and accessible things available to archaeologists, and it’s really important that we understand them properly, not just as examples of architectural design from specific points in the past, but as processes. A building has a meaningful existence from the first thought that it might be a solution to a particular problem, right through to the point at which it has been and gone and no longer has any physical trace or existence in memory, if that could ever actually happen. Understandably, the bit of that process we tend to focus on is when it looks like a building and has or had people using it. Construction and demolition sites, however, are everpresent in our lives, and represent more than just a means-to-an-end.
Before the sites can happen, existing and future buildings, landscapes, people and ways of life are argued over in architects’ studios and council meetingchambers, procedures that heavily involve inputs from archaeologists and heritage consultants. In fact, heritage consultants are routinely asked to assess the impacts on the historic built environment of the construction phases
of larger projects, so it’s not as if we’re not present in the right spaces to think about it. But when archaeologists do that work of understanding the process and impacts of construction and demolition, it is future-thinking, avoiding harm to heritage assets in the imagined perfect world of the “finished” site. What we don’t do is continue our engagement and try to understand what the building site means, what a halfbuilt building means for a street, or a skyline. And while we might often be present during demolition of sites, our watching briefs do not stretch to trying to understand what it means for a building to be part-way to nonexistence, not quite something, not quite nothing. Understanding construction and demolition takes the normal future-work of archaeologists, and strips it of its speculative nature, allowing us to think more certainly about now.
The burning of the roof of NotreDame de Paris is, in a way, only a small part of this kind of understanding. The building could not quite be said to be under construction, despite the roof works and presence of scaffolding, and it was not destroyed, however much it looked like that might become the case on April 15. However, as arguments over whether the new roof should be a sober reconstruction of what was there before or a bold modern design show, we now have the opportunity to understand the building in the context of contemporary creative processes. And although the majority of the building is still standing, the nature of the fire means we can also understand it in its own right as a halfbuilding. Completion of work on the roof is projected to take up to 40 years. Half-built Notre-Dame is the NotreDame of the rest of our lives.
We can approach the Notre-Dame of today at a number of different scales. There is the one we’re perhaps used to, where the fire will have revealed aspects of the physical fabric of the building we could not see before. Then there is the building as a whole, which we were able to appreciate without a roof covering for a short time. We shouldn’t be sad or dismayed to see it “in this state”, especially as it is on the way to being repaired. Seeing photographs of the aftermath of the fire with the interior of the cathedral full of sunlight unmediated by stained glass is some way from the intended experience of the building, and is surely not the ideal encounter; but it is what the building was for that short time. It is as much part of Notre-Dame as any other time before or since.
Even as I write, the news is reporting the first service to be held in the cathedral since the fire, everything as normal, but with everyone in hard hats. It’s not something we can ignore. As archaeologists, we have to deal with the conditions of the site on the day we arrive. We can only find what’s there. Right now, what’s there is a medieval cathedral without a roof. It also exists differently in the landscape, especially as part of the Paris skyline. In relatively quick succession, we will have been able to experience the largely medieval to 19th-century building and silhouette, followed by the scaffolding of the previous works, then the cathedral on fire, soon the building topped by monumental scaffolding and cranes and, in due course, a new roof, perhaps a new silhouette, a change to the Paris skyline which it must be hoped will retain the illusion of permanence at least until the fire has passed out of living memory.
In-between states
Perhaps comparable is the phenomenon of facadism, where a building is demolished but, usually with heritage justification, the street frontage is retained and a new building raised behind. There are countless examples of this happening across the country and debates around it usually ask whether it is an appropriate use of historic architecture, or whether it is somehow “lying” to front your modern office block with an historic facade. Archaeologists don’t need to be part of that debate. What is much more interesting for us is that point in time when the facade of a building is left standing as an object in its own right. A new building behind an old facade is so much less of a disruption than walking past a facade and being able to look through the windows and see not occupants, offices or a living room, but a jcb or a site hut, maybe even some archaeologists. If there’s anything of archaeological interest in facaderetention, it’s that moment when the building, the street, genuinely, fleetingly, meant something different, and the whole process of facadism was revealed.
This isn’t just a matter of waiting for
traumatic events to happen and using them to understand things differently, which screams opportunism and sensationalism. We can also use this appreciation of in-between states and the befores and afters of what we commonly think of as “finished” buildings to plan better for the future. Take, for instance, the Palace of Westminster in London (feature May/Jun 2017/154). We can look at this complex of buildings and understand it as a piece of architecture, noting that it has been continually altered over the years of its existence and is due for a major refurbishment. That, on its own, would be a mistake.
For a start, the Palace is very much “live”, as water pouring through the ceiling of the House of Commons chamber and myriad other problems demonstrate clearly. It is already doing something that we can and should understand. It is falling down. What we hope to avoid is the traumatic event where a wall collapses or the Palace catches fire, but we can already try to understand the building as one that is undergoing a very slow destructive process that mps have been reluctant to address. Every quick fix is a tiny act of demolition; floor tiles from the building are being sold online. This World Heritage Site is being literally dismantled, and as archaeologists we can do something more interesting than just think about the old Palace of Westminster and the new one whenever it comes to exist. We can think instead about the process of the building and its constant, slow degradation, part natural, part the act of people, part the inaction of its occupants. If anything, it will make us more prepared for the event of catastrophic failure of some part of it in the future.
Traumatic events like the burning of the roof of Notre-Dame, or of the Glasgow School of Art, or the Royal Clarence Hotel in Exeter are just that; traumatic events that affect real people and that we understandably approach from the perspective of loss and with an attitude of fixing the problem. This is right and important. However, as archaeologists, we can also take the opportunity to understand the inbetween states these buildings find themselves in, and therein better understand what buildings are, how they exist, how they impact lives and landscapes and, perhaps, better prepare ourselves for future catastrophe.
Look around you. None of this will exist forever, but most of it will outlast you. You won’t get to work on understanding the thing that comes next, but you can understand how the things of now are changing, sometimes almost imperceptibly and sometimes over the course of one horrific evening. Buildings are most interesting when they’re being made or destroyed. Get out there and stare at some building sites. They are what buildings archaeology is.