architecture – Page 3 – Life In A Word

When I went to Sunday school many, many years ago, they taught us the little ditty “Here Is The Church” (… here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people). You’d make a church with your hands pressed together as you sang, raising the steeple by extending and touching the tips of your pointer fingers. Today, sixty-odd years later, those same hands will build a cathedral – Notre-Dame de Paris. Granted my church is made from LEGO blocks and the entire model will be smaller than a cornerstone of the real Notre-Dame, but at least the steeple is made from more than fingers.

So then, “Here Is The Cathedral”… in its purchased form. The cardboard box you see is not what I would call huge, but it’s an ample residence for 4,383 plastic pieces. These pieces dwell in thirty-four separate plastic bag communities, just begging to be liberated. Buried underneath all these subdivisions (in the crypt, if you will) is the brick of an instruction manual, a veritable phone book of almost 300 pages. C’mon, you didn’t think we’d raise this cathedral in a single blog post, did you?

Mr. Instruction Manual could be called the mayor of this manufactured mess. He guides me on who gets together with who, when they get together, how they get together, and what it’s all supposed to look like as I go. Mr. Manual has pages and pages of impressive illustrations (like this one), but also some LOL ones (like the one below). I mean, check out the upper left corner. Am I really supposed to vigorously shake the bag out like that? The tiny residents will go running in all directions! We’re trying to create order from chaos here, people, not the other way around.

I expect all of the same challenges I encountered when I built the LEGO Grand Piano. I’ll think pieces are missing until somehow they appear right in front of me. I’ll connect pieces incorrectly and have to backtrack several steps to get them right. I’ll be left with extra pieces every now and then, and forever wonder if they were really “extra” or perhaps “overlooked”. And I’ll police plastic piles around the meager real estate of my home office desk. Maybe I require a shepherd’s crook or a bullhorn? I mean, it’s me versus 4,383 others so you can see how one or two of them are bound to escape.

Here’s a thoughtful aspect of LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris, and oh-so appealing to the architect in me. The model will be built in the same chronological order as the original was (instead of, say, from the ground up). The first twenty years of Notre-Dame’s construction produced only the rounded east end you see here, which served by itself as a functioning church. The next twenty years generated the full footprint but without the roof, towers, and other noteworthy exterior elements. The final sixty years brought everything across the finish line. So I’ll be building the LEGO model in the same order, only in a hundred days (or less) instead of a hundred years.

Before I snap Piece 1 onto Piece 2, let me dress down my many thousands of new plastic friends. Together they comprise nowhere near the largest of the LEGO sets. A model of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts Castle is over 6,000 pieces. The LEGO Star Wars Millennium Falcon is over 7,500 pieces. LEGO Titanic (er, before it sank): 9,000 pieces. And standing regally at the top of the LEGO podium (and just a twenty-minute bus ride from Notre-Dame de Paris): the Eiffel Tower, the only LEGO model to exceed 10,000 pieces. To each of these top-tens I say non. Notre-Dame will be challenge enough for this builder/blogger.

LEGO Notre-Dame de Paris – Update #1

Now that we’ve had the prelude (so to speak) it’s time for the church service to begin! Bag #1 – of 34 bags of pieces – houses the first 100 or so of the little guys. LEGO thoughtfully opted for a sub-community in Bag #1 for the tiniest of residents (some of which are just begging for tweezers).

Mr. Instruction Manual (who is multilingual by the way; he speaks English, French, and Spanish), warns me to “… avoid danger of suffocation by keeping this bag away from babies and children!” Mr. Manual also wants me to know my thousand of pieces were manufactured in five different countries: Denmark (of course), Mexico, Hungary, China, and the Czech Republic.

It’s fair to say I haven’t stood in the LEGO “pulpit” for awhile. I snapped pieces together incorrectly at least three times today. I also thought I was missing pieces twice, and I fretted over the fact I ended up with two leftovers. Let’s hope our church service is smoother next week! In the meantime, here is the build of Bag #1. Not much to look at but at least it’s the foundation of the east end of the Cathedral. In 1163 Pope Alexander III oversaw the first stone being set in place. In 2025 nobody saw me do the same.

Bag #: 1

Running build time: 25:38.

Total leftover pieces: 2

When we babysit our granddaughters here at the house, we tap into several items to make the job easier. A big basket of toys and stuffed animals sits in the corner of our living room. A dozen children’s books line the lowest shelf just waiting to tell their stories. Sesame Street is easily streamed on the nearby television. And at dinner time we roll out the high chair so everyone’s on the same level. So who would’ve thought a high chair would be my blog topic for today? Maybe you, if you know anything about cathedrals.

We’re almost there, loyal readers. I will lay the corner-block of my LEGO model of Notre-Dame de Paris next week. Why not this week, you ask? Because before we crack the seal on the giant box of pieces, we need to pay a little respect to the real Cathedral. I want you to know a few things about the stone and glass Notre-Dame before you witness the rising of the plastic one.

It’s a cathedral in the middle of Paris, Dave… what more do I need to know? Uh, a LOT more. To begin with, do you even know what a cathedral is? I didn’t (and I have a background in architecture, for gosh sake). It’s a big, giant church with stained glass and chapels and a raised altar, you say. Well yes, you’re right, but what makes a church a cathedral? Interestingly, it has nothing to do with the building itself. Instead, a cathedral is the seat of a bishop (the ordained clergy-person who presides over the surrounding parishes). For lack of a church this person could just as easily be in a small house and it would still be considered a cathedral.

Cathedrals really do have “high chairs” on their altars for the bishops (cathedra in Latin means “seat”) but Notre-Dame de Paris is much more than a place for furniture. First and foremost, it took a hundred years to construct (1163-1260). In that era the building evolved from the common Romanesque style of the period to the more elegant French Gothic. Notre-Dame feels unusually vertical and airy for a structure of its time and there’s a novel reason for this: flying buttresses.

Imagine Notre-Dame’s architect – Eugène Viollet-le-Duc – talking to the Paris city council in the twelfth century and saying, “Look guys, let’s think outside the box here… literally. The structural support for this church ought to be outside of the building instead of inside”. Why would the architect want this? Because the flying buttresses assume the structural load that was previously handled by short, thick interior walls. The result is taller, more dramatic spaces, filled with the light of high-up stained glass windows. In other words, flying buttresses allow Notre-Dame to “reach for the heavens” much better than its Romanesque predecessors.

There’s also more to this French “grande dame” than structure, of course. Notre-Dame has twenty-nine chapels surrounding the main sanctuary (that’s gonna take a lot of LEGO). It features three spectacular stained glass “rose” windows that would not be as large or as high were it not for those flying buttresses. Notre-Dame’s twin towers host ten massive bronze bells and they each have first names. “Emmanuel” (listen to his sound bite below) and “Marie” are so big they take up the entire south tower, while their eight ringing siblings all fit into the north tower.

Notre-Dame also has a central flèche, a spire not unlike the ones you see on more modest churches. This spire, however, is topped by a bronze rooster, which is not only the symbol of the French state but also a container for (supposedly) a small piece of the Crown of Thorns, worn by Jesus leading up to his crucifixion.

As you would expect, Notre-Dame de Paris hosts countless works of art, whether paintings or sculptures. Many of the sculptures are biblical scenes intended to educate the illiterate parishioners of the twelfth century. But my favorite sculptures may be those of the twelve apostles, way up high surrounding the base of the flèche and looking outwards towards Paris… all except one. St. Thomas – patron saint of architects – faces Notre-Dame itself, and was given the facial features of Viollet-le-Duc.

Okay, so now you know more about Notre-Dame de Paris than just the LEGO model. Considering there are over 500 Gothic cathedrals in Europe, it’s impressive to see Notre-Dame at the very top of at least one “Top Ten Cathedrals” list. We’ll visit some of those other “high chairs” in future posts, to add even more life to my pile of plastic pieces. In the meantime, my LEGO “church service” begins promptly at 10am next Thursday.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Category: architecture

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