In the first half of the last century the predominant form of architectural research and thought focused on the global problem of housing. Today, we are in a similar housing crisis; war, climate and scarcity are the source of a migratory crisis that is just surfacing around the world. The devastation at Notre-Dame de Paris symbolizes our collective vulnerability, through architecture. The original spire, in its medieval context represented man’s attempt to reach the heavens. Today’s spire reaches across the earth itself, the realm of the mortal god, destroyed by person-kind. It is not a spear to the heart of god, but a hug for Gaia. If the Cathedral was once a house for the immortal God, the fire in 2019 made clear the mortality of this endeavour. It should be remade into the House of the Un-housed, for the people who walk the earth without, as Christ once did, and for the descendants of Mary Magdalene, of Esmeralda. The reconstruction can embody the lessons gleaned from the fall of the Tower of Babel; we do not spiral upward, but forward, to tomorrow through yesterday. It as an opportunity to complete Constant’s (New Babylon) vision, of a Paris rising from the ashes of itself and freeing itself in a cloud over the urban-scape.

Artist: Dimitri Papatheodorou