Notre Dame Cathedral lay in the pre-dawn cold like a spaceship docked in the heart of Paris, its exoskeleton of scaffolding illuminated by bright lights. Pink clouds appeared in the east as machines whirred to life and workers began clambering about.
One of them, Hank Silver, wearing a yellow helmet, stood on a platform above the River Seine and attached cables to oak trusses in the shape of massive wooden triangles. A crane lifted them onto the nave of the cathedral, which was destroyed by fire in 2019.
Mr. Silver – a 41-year-old American-Canadian carpenter – is an unlikely candidate to work on the restoration of an 860-year-old Gothic monument and Catholic monument in France. Born in New York City to an observant Jewish family, he owns a small craftsmanship business in rural New England and admits that until recently he didn’t even know what a ship was.
But there is no other place Mr. Silver would rather be.
For the close-knit international community of traditional carpenters and woodworking specialists, the loss of Notre-Dame’s centuries-old oak latticework was a tragedy. It has also given them a way to show the world that their manual tools and techniques have stood the test of time.
“Nobody builds cathedrals anymore,” at least like this, Mr. Silver said recently over lunch, as he scrolled through photos of Notre Dame on his phone and described the camaraderie shared by the nearly 500 journeymen, craftsmen and supervisors who work on site. The opportunity to work on a project like this, he added, is “once in a millennium.”
“It has lifted all the artisans in France and in the world,” he said. “How many kids staring at their iPads are even aware that they could grow up to be a stonemason, a traditional carpenter, a bricklayer?”
Notre Dame will reopen in December – just over five years after the fire, as promised by President Emmanuel Macron in the days that followed.
The vaults have been almost completely rebuilt and cleaned, a new gilded copper cockerel has been placed on top of the finished point of the spire and the wooden attic has been renewed. The renovations will continue even after the reopening.
The reconstruction is a complicated puzzle with a tight schedule and a complex ballet of stonemasons, painters, stained glass restorers, gold leaf decorators, steeple spirers, crane operators, organ cleaners and roofers.
“This cathedral speaks to all of us,” said Philippe Jost, head of the reconstruction task force. France’s best artisans rushed to participate, he said, but the presence of a few foreigners like Mr. Silver was also meaningful.
“It says a lot about the appeal and fascination that this extraordinary monument exerts,” Mr Jost said.
Mr. Silver’s path to Notre Dame began with Carpenters Without Borders, or CSF, a France-based organization of traditional woodworkers who volunteer to restore unique structures, such as a castle moat bridge in France or octagonal wells in Romania.
Through CSF, Mr. Silver had become friends with Loïc Desmonts, who runs a traditional carpentry business in Normandy with his father.
In 2022, Mr Desmonts’ company was selected to rebuild the ship’s woodwork, in collaboration with Ateliers Perrault, a company from western France with expertise in historical monuments. Mr. Desmonts asked Mr. Silver and Will Gusakov, a woodcarver based in Vermont, to put together a small squad of Americans to join him.
“Sometimes it felt a bit funny to work as an American on an almost typical French project,” says Gusakov, who temporarily moved to France with his wife and two toddlers. But, he added, “Everyone was so excited.”
Mr Silver arrived in January 2023 and spent eight months in a workshop in the Normandy countryside, recreating the nave’s wooden framework, a solid oak structure of almost 60 trusses between the spire and the belfry towers, measuring 30 meters in length, 13 meters wide and 10 meters high. high.
Like almost the entire renovation of Notre-Dame, the attic was redesigned exactly as it was before the fire: a replica where each truss is unique and fits within the curved and uneven walls of the cathedral.
“We are restoring a large part of the authenticity of the wooden framework,” says Rémi Fromont, one of the chief architects of Notre-Dame and an expert in carpentry. “The same materials, the same techniques and the same design.”
The aim is to preserve an important architectural heritage – the original 13th-century woodwork was a turning point for the time, Mr Fromont said – and to demonstrate that age-old carpentry methods are still efficient.
In traditional woodworking circles, including for Americans, “an identical reconstruction was the only solution,” Mr. Desmonts said.
Mr. Silver and other carpenters cut the oak logs largely by hand, first with long-handled axes, then with broad axes. Some axes were made especially for the project by blacksmiths in a forge in Alsace, in eastern France.
The carpenters drew a full-scale plan of each truss directly on the shop floor and then carefully placed the beams that would comprise the truss in its unique location on it. Using a plumb line to accurately map the irregularities of each piece, they laid out each joint to create a tight fit.
The beams are assembled using mortise and tenon joinery, where a projecting tenon fits into a mortise and tenon and is held in place with an oak peg. The trusses were assembled in the workshop for a dry-fit, then dismantled and transported by truck to Paris, where carpenters reassembled them.
Next, Mr. Silver will work with roofers to nail down oak planks that will form the roof deck, which will be covered in lead.
He and the other workers cannot wear their work clothes home to avoid bringing with them lead particles deposited after the fire burned the original roof.
Mr. Silver said he cherishes the time he has left at Notre Dame, whether he uses it to admire the sunset from a balcony full of snarling chimeras or to take one last close-up view of a stained-glass lead window that will soon no longer be accessible.
“It never gets old,” he said.
Growing up in New York City, no one around him worked wood, Mr. Silver said. His mother was a speech therapist; his father did compliance work for Wall Street firms and wrote a financial newsletter.
He also did not come into contact with many churches. Mr. Silver’s father became a rabbi when his son was a teenager, and the son declared himself an atheist at the age of five.
Mr. Silver later studied filmmaking in Montreal. But while helping his grandmother move in the early 2000s, he came across old books that beautifully illustrated traditional woodworking.
“I became completely fascinated,” he said. After completing his studies, he began working on home remodeling and then moved to Vermont where he learned traditional timber framing. He later started a small lumber business in western Massachusetts and joined the Timber Framer’s Guild.
Thanks to a skilled worker visa that provides access to a French residence permit, Mr. Silver now lives in Paris, where he expects to remain for several years. He next plans to work in the French countryside, where he occasionally travels for one-off construction or teaching gigs.
“I was ready for a change in my life anyway,” he said after a morning of searching for apartments. “I’ve always wanted to live in Europe.”
He already peppers his English with French carpentry terms such as ‘sablière’ (a wall plate). When Mr. Macron visited Notre-Dame in December, Mr. Silver even gave him a letter asking for French citizenship.
“People don’t think of carpentry as some kind of business, profession or vocation that takes you around the world,” he said. A skeptical border agent at Boston airport once questioned him about his visa until Mr. Silver explained that he was working on Notre Dame.
“’That’s the coolest job,’” Mr. Silver recalled the officer saying.
He agreed.