Notre Dame cathedral under restoration
Shutterstock/Jerome LaBoiley
When a fire destroyed much of Notre Dame Cathedral’s famous spire and roof in 2019, the immediate damage and subsequent renovation work left large iron staples holding up many of the building’s stone blocks was unexpectedly revealed. Analysis indicates that Notre Dame Cathedral was the first Gothic cathedral to use such iron reinforcement throughout its structure. This fact highlights the iconic building as a high-tech, modern marvel of its time.
“You can see they were doing things like the Empire State Building circa 1930, or the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which was pretty amazing at the time,” says Robert Bork of the University of Iowa, who was not involved in the analysis. says. “You can compare it to a 1960s moonshot, or you can compare it to some big tech initiatives today.”
Notre Dame Cathedral was the tallest building ever built when the project first began in medieval Paris in the 1160s. His Maxime L’Héritier and his colleagues at the University of Paris VIII Vincennes Saint Denis in France surveyed the cathedral during its ongoing restoration and found that the building has thousands of staples from the floor to the upper walls. could be estimated.
“The fact that the framework burned made us see some previously invisible staples,” says L’Héritier. He explained that each stapler is about 50 centimeters long and weighs from 2 to 4 kilograms.
A closer analysis of the 12 staples revealed that they were used in the early stages of cathedral construction, according to the researchers. They performed a radiocarbon dating analysis on material samples taken from the staples, each sample being an alloy of carbon and iron. This was done by melting the iron, leaving behind the carbon derived from the charcoal used in medieval iron-making furnaces.
The use of iron to reinforce the stone and other features of the building (such as the iron joints in the stained-glass windows) was important in creating the cathedral’s Gothic architecture, Boak said. increase. Unlike the blocky stone architecture of the Roman period, the medieval architects of Gothic architecture took advantage of such iron innovations to create structures that appeared lighter and more detailed.
“Compared to other cathedrals such as Reims, Notre Dame’s structure in Paris is light and elegant,” says Jennifer Feltman of the University of Alabama, who was not involved in the analysis. “This study confirms that the use of iron made possible the lightweight construction of Paris, and the use of this material was important to the design of Notre-Dame’s first Gothic architects.”
The team also began comparing the elemental composition of various iron staples to see if the iron was produced in a particular steel mill. Many of the locations were within a day’s walk of Paris, he says, L’Héritier. In this archaeological investigation process, a laser can be used to pulverize iron samples for mass spectrometric analysis. This allows comparison of chemical features.
An analysis of the current strength of iron staples provides modern architects with information on how undamaged iron staples can be reused in rebuilding Notre Dame Cathedral to its former glory. is not a time of diagnosis, but a time of repair,” says L’Héritier.
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