‘It was so fragile, we weren’t certain it wouldn’t collapse’: the architect who sketched Notre Dame’s ancient insides | Art

When Notre Dame de Paris went up in flames in April 2019, architecture student Axelle Ponsonnet was just one of the French capital’s 2.1 million residents to witness a disaster unfolding in her own city. Ponsonnet had no inkling that a year later, she would be joining the workforce tasked with rebuilding the cathedral.

Emmanuel Macron had promised Notre Dame would reopen within five years. The roof – with its charpente (wooden structure), lead covering and flèche (spire) – had collapsed entirely; there were several holes in the ribbed vaults beneath and widespread lead pollution throughout the site. Ponsonnet was hired in 2020 as a junior architect to work on the team rebuilding the roof. “The cathedral was still completely charred and open to the elements, the rain falling inside,” she says. “We weren’t certain more of it wouldn’t collapse, it was so fragile.”

Her day job involved contributing to architectural studies and technical specifications for how to restore the roofing structures. But with continual free access to the chantier [construction site], she also started walking around with a sketch book at night. In January, just under 50 of her drawings will be published in a coffee-table book by the Paris-based publishing house Studio Mitsu, with accompanying archival materials and essays.

Ponsonnet studied at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville, “one of the last schools in France and perhaps all of Europe where you can still study old-school academic drawing,” she says. Ponsonnet loved it, though being on the chantier in a solely technical capacity left her frustrated: “I was just aching to draw everything that was happening.”

France’s chief architect of historic monuments, Philippe Villeneuve, has succeeded in creating an unusually collegiate atmosphere on the chantier: everyone says “tu” and not “vous” to each other. Despite this, Ponsonnet kept her drawing a secret for a whole year before building up the courage to ask him for official permission. “I had a whole speech prepared, about how we had to document this historic moment and that drawing was better than photography. But I didn’t need any of it because he just said yes immediately. ‘You’re the only one who knows how to do this,’ he told me. And it’s true, I don’t know of anyone else in any of the teams who would have done drawings of the project.”For three years, Ponsonnet was given an afternoon a week of her work time to draw. She would climb the scaffolding towers, with her board and her demi-raisin format sheets of paper (32.5 by 50 cm), and perch in the cold or the shadows for hours on end. She quizzed other teams about important stages of the restoration process to cover, but mostly she marvelled at the extremely modern structures – the wooden supports for the flying buttresses, the forests of scaffolding, the giant cranes – that had been mustered to bring this ancient edifice back to life.

Like a ship’s captain, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the architect responsible for the 19th-century update of Notre Dame, kept a detailed journal of his schedule of works, which Villeneuve’s team closely studied. They toyed with the idea of keeping a journal too, but there just wasn’t time. Ponsonnet’s architectural training, however, means that the scenes, details and stages she’s focused on in her drawings build up a similar kind of record.

Ponsonnet is now leaving the chantier to focus on her drawing. “I have loads of sketches that aren’t really finished. I want to push them further, and work on larger formats. I also want to do etchings based on my sketches and photographs.”

It is no easy move, though: “All of us say the same thing: there’s such a particular energy here. I don’t really have any experience to compare it with. But our older colleagues tell us to not expect work to ever be like this again.” A truly “collective adventure”, as she puts it, indelibly captured in pencil and time.

Nothing but a Dame: five sketches by Axelle Ponsonnet

The Géants Saw Mill, the Four Oaks
December 2021, pencil on paper
These four slightly curved trunks were the largest needed in rebuilding the roof structure. The saw mill had to build a specialist moving saw just to be able to process them. Ponsonnet was awed by the complexity and the size of it all: “Sitting in discussions, even with the bosses who have such a crazy amount of experience under their belts, there were many moments where no one could really say how this charpente worked – how it stood.”

The Tip of the Flèche
September 2023, pencil on paper
“I thought it interesting to include not only drawings on which I’d worked a lot back in the studio, but also sketches like this one, that I did in one go on site.” Here she was in the scaffolding itself, about 70 metres above ground. It was all moving so fast. This kind of transitory moment where extremely long bits of scaffolding surround the growing charpente gives a sense of the urgency gripping the chantier at large.

The Pelican
December 2023, charcoal and pierre noire on paper
Ponsonnet drew this standing on the Galerie des Chimères (of which this sculpted bird is one). “It’s a balcony on the northern tower of the choir and the perfect spot from which to see how things are progressing.” Carpenters were rebuilding the flèche at the same time as the scaffolders were working around them. She loved the fast-moving structure with its bottle-like shape and the clouded sky surrounding it.

Southern Transept, The Removal of the Forest of Scaffolding
February 2023, pencil on paper
“At one point, the entire internal volume of the cathedral was filled with scaffolding,” says Ponsonnet. The workers needed access to all the wall surfaces in order to clean them, not just of the lead pollution resulting from the fire, but of centuries of grime. This hampered any view of the immensity of the building, but it also provided Ponsonnet with viewpoints – at a level with the columns’ capitals, say, or the vaults – that no one else has had since the building itself was built. “And then when they started taking the scaffolding down, it was like everything could breathe again.”

Sanguine of Saint-Denis
April 2024, red chalk on paper
One of the larger reworked drawings, this depicts the roof’s imposing statues being reinstalled on the gable, a big moment that “symbolised the end of the reconstruction of the roof”. These three-metre figures had to be removed after the fire for fear that they might cause the vaults to collapse if they fell.