Retired Duke professor helped restore the famed Notre Dame cathedral in Paris
PARIS (WTVD) — As the doors reopened this weekend at the world-renowned Notre Dame cathedral, visitors were welcomed to a site no one has seen in centuries.
One of the people who helped bring the icon back to life has strong ties to North Carolina.
Dr. Caroline Bruzelius taught at Duke University for many decades. The architectural historian has been captivated for most of her life by her field of study.
“The building can’t speak for itself. That the task of someone like me, an architectural historian, is to tell the story of the building,” she told ABC11. “More than 50 years of going up and down walls and trying to unravel stories that are not documented by texts.”
Medieval buildings present an intriguing challenge to Bruzelius, with limited or sometimes nonexistent records – and no way to know who built them or how.
“It’s detective work, you have to look at the walls and figure out what happened and how it happened and how it was made,” she said.
It was while she was living in Paris in the late 1970s that she first started studying the famed Notre Dame cathedral up close as she noticed crews were cleaning it.
“I asked for permission to climb up that scaffolding and as it moved gradually in vertical slices from east to west, I went up over and over and over again. I was measuring stones, I was recording molding profiles. I was looking for clues in the walls about how that building was made,” Bruzelius said.
She published her findings eight years later – a study that has held up well over time.
Then, in 2019, a fire ripped through the iconic structure she’d grown to know so well.
