Upper Nave | Notre-Dame de Paris | Briefing

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Notre-Dame de Paris | Upper Nave
Professor Murray

The removal of layers of plaster and paint that had covered the flanks of the nave buttresses that form the dividing walls of the chapels has revealed that the entire unit belongs to the original construction—they were not extended. These areas of masonry were not heavily restored in the nineteenth century.

At this point we may draw upon our creative imaginations. I want you to project upward a tall central vessel supported on columns with a girth (diameter) of over two meters. The superstructure is relatively thin and the high vaults will need some kind of external buttressing—but what form should this buttressing take?

Now flank the main vessel with an inner aisle having slender supports with a diameter of some ninety centimeters. These skinny supports carry a masonry-vaulted gallery.

Add the outer aisle whose exterior wall is braced by buttresses that project a full five meters. Now do you want to bring the weight of the main vaults, carried by flyers, down upon a ninety-centimeter column that is already charged by the heavy gallery? Or would you rather extend the flyer to the point where it can sit atop an upright that has enough mass and rigidity to perform its job? If the first solution is accepted, then we might find that the structural logic is seriously challenged.

But beyond this kind of deductive logic-game there are two much firmer bits of evidence. First the form of the twelfth-century choir flyers were long-reach eleven-meter units. There is no reason why the nave units should be any different. Even more convincing is the fact that the intermediary piers of the aisles are not aligned with the main piers. In other words, if an intermediary upright sat atop one of these slender units, the flyers it would carry would not follow a straight line but would be seriously skewed. It is clear that the slender intermediary aisle piers never formed any part of the structural system that provided support for the high vaults

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