Notre-Dame rings changes on ways to keep historical monuments safe

The bells of the northern bell tower of Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral chimed on Sunday, signaling completion of the major restoration work and reopening of the cathedral to the public, five years and eight months after a sudden fire destroyed the cathedral's spire and shocked the world on April 15, 2019.

The French government had set a goal to rebuild Notre-Dame within five years and now they have honored their words. According to reports, the restoration team used 2,400 oak trees to reconstruct the roof, while also meticulously restoring over 2,000 sculptures and decorations.

Equally noteworthy is that the restoration process saw ancient craftsmanship blending with cutting-edge technology. Design software giant Autodesk was invited to develop a digital model of Notre-Dame de Paris. Its CEO said it took them more than a year to create digital models of 12,000 objects, over 30,000 square meters of stone walls, more than 3,900 square meters of lead roofing, and 186 church vaults. Design company Art Graphique & Patrimoine, which had made detailed digital scans of most of the cathedral's interiors before the fire, collaborated with Autodesk to rescan the site to understand what the fire had changed.

Latest technologies such as artificial intelligence played a significant part in the reconstruction, which is an example of the coming together of people's determination to restore an ancient building and modern technology.

One cannot exclude the role of VR technology that allows visitors to have a virtual tour of the cathedral online. While reconstruction will help visitors visit the place, a virtual tour will reduce the number of real visitors, thus ensuring better protection of the cathedral.

Notre-Dame de Paris' reconstruction has also popularized the modern technology employed in the process. In recent years, many museums, such as China's Silk Road Online Museum that opened in June 2021, have used digital modeling and virtual tours. In 2020, a travel company, Expedia, invited artists to reconstruct the seven wonders of the world, restoring them to their original form and making graphics interchange format files allowing people to see how these wonders were built and destroyed.

Now, with the reconstructed Notre-Dame open to tourists and its virtual tour attracting more visitors than ever, the technology is famous all over and will rally wider support for their developers. More museums will hopefully embrace the technologies, thus minimizing risks of them disappearing because of some unforeseen mishap and granting more visitors the chance to appreciate their treasures across distances.