There were the students and professors, who had joyfully stepped out of their air-conditioned classrooms to take their study of medieval architecture literally into their own hands. Others, like Sophie Linnell of the class of North Bennet Street School, were preservation carpentry students who had elected to skip their own graduation to drive from Boston with their teacher Michael Burrey to work their hands to blisters practicing their new skills on an extraordinary project. There were the students from the National Park Service Historic Preservation Training Center who stood alongside graduate students from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, all of whom came from a distance to join the project, knowing the excruciating late-summer humidity of Washington, DC awaited them and expecting nothing as rational as pay or even college credit in return.
But also present in the crowd were dozens of talented craftspeople, like Peter Henrikson and Gerry David who came from the northern reaches of Minnesota to lead and explore traditional processes alongside both experts and adventurous beginners alike. Long-standing members of the Timber Framers Guild, like Jackson DuBois and Miles Jenness, were present to share their skills and tools for riving pegs from oak logs, and scribing joinery with nothing more than a “plump bob” and a string. Joining too were members of the international craft community, Charpentiers sans Frontières (Carpenters Without Borders) Hank Silver and Jordan Finch who helped assembled the team of talented craftspeople from around the country to participate in the project, connecting us with fellow craftsmen in France to swap thoughts about what tools and processes should be used for this reconstruction workshop. And there were passionate leaders like Mez Welch and Ross Beebe of Rockbridge Timberframes in Lexington, VA who had walked hundreds of acres of forest, hand-harvesting the 30 white oak trees needed for the project, meticulously following the medieval harvesting protocol shared with us by our Charpentiers sans Frontières partners in France. A variety of other professionals, architects, sculptors and builders took time off from their own busy schedules to volunteer, and share their expertise toward the common goal. All joyfully cut timbers like it was the most exciting way they could imagine spending their summer vacations. And documentary filmmakers Rian Brown and Jake Hochendoner of Orsolopolis Studios and journalist Doug Starr of Smithsonian Magazine, lived among the rest of us, chronicling the rich layers of story billowing off the electrifying energy of every moment.
This sweat-soaked scene was all part of the first workshop of the Handshouse Studio Notre-Dame Project: an ambitious effort to bring our educational mission to illuminate and rebuild a portion of the architectural heritage lost in the 2019 fire. Handshouse, an unusual non-profit with a history of successfully achieving big ideas, had assembled a community of people to reconstruct a full-scale replica of Choir Truss #6, one section of the timber structure that had held the roof of Notre-Dame. We were unified in our commitment to use only the tools and materials available to the original craftspeople who built the cathedral, and committed to referencing the archival records to reconstruct the structure as accurately as possible. Moreover, inspired by the symbolic gesture of French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi who gave America our Statue of Liberty, we hoped we could somehow contribute to the monumental task of reconstructing Notre-Dame de Paris.
But why? Why build a full-scale replica of a Notre-Dame truss an ocean away from the official reconstruction efforts in Paris? Why raise it not only once with the blessing of Cardinal Wilton Gregory under the backdrop of the Basilica of the National Shrine, but eight additional times!? Why take apart and drive 8000 pounds of timbers around DC, then Atlanta, to Michigan, and to New York? Why go to the trouble of obtaining permits and arranging for people to drive, reassemble, rig, and raise one truss again inside the National
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