Put this together this afternoon. Barely remember visiting in 1954 and some pictures my parents took.
Viva La France
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Yeah, very bummed to hear what happened to Notre Dame yesterday. Great tribute! 
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This is wonderful. Great idea to turn something that is so heartbreaking into a positive and creative outcome.
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Nice!
Was such a shame to see that building engulfed in towering flames. Something like 850 years old, took a century to build. So happy it wasn’t completely destroyed.
France was instrumental in our struggle for independence, I would like to see our government step up and aid our oldest ally in rebuilding that cultural icon.
Many millions have been donated by individuals already. Refreshing to see the best in people rise to a need in times of tragedy. Viva La France! 
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Macron wants it rebuilt in 5 years. Heard others talk about 10 years but it will get rebuilt. Take a lot less time to haul giant wood beams in place with a tall crane than it does with scaffolding and donkey power.
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Amusing comparison. We take so much for granted, they had nothing to compare that workflow with.
I think 5 years might be realistic, considering the cultural significance of that church… not to mention the tourists contribution to the local economy.
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Took 200 years the first go round and they had massive trees all over for the taking.
This will be a huge undertaking just to get it looking 'sort of ’ what it did, and I would not put any time pressure on the builder (or builders).
The planning, blueprint, and logistic chain parts alone will probably eat almost half of that 5 years.
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Lovely tile.
It’s really sad about Notre Dame. It was a gorgeous building. I think having grown up in MA around so many “early settler” villages, the thing that impacted me most about my first trip to France (and later other parts of the world) was just how old the buildings are. We grew up thinking that 400 years ago everyone was living in cabins (or castles, I suppose) which is absurd, but it’s what our history lessons reflected.
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The writeup on Ars: The trees that made up the roof’s wooden structure were cut down around 1160, and some sources estimate that the beams accounted for 13,000 trees, or about 21 hectares of Medieval forest, many of which had been growing since the 800s or 900s. “You have a stage in France where deforestation was a problem; these buildings consumed huge amounts of wood.” That’s according to Columbia University art historian Stephen Murray, who spoke with Ars Technica. All that wood, he said, supported an outer roof of lead—until the wood burned and the roof collapsed.
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Wouldn’t surprise me to see them substitute modern composite materials or steel and make it look like wood. Modern fire regulations are not very flexible.
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The first problem is that such trees of that size no longer exist but a full 3D of them does. I could imagine tubular stainless steel of exactly the shapes, but much greater strength, and a fraction of the weight, and painted with a reproduction of the surface textures. And only very close inspection would reveal what they really were.
There would be a lot of folk not satisfied, but short of a time warp to keep the fire from happening there can be no actual restoration.
Does anyone know where a copy of that total scan might be found? It would be totally amazing to build a 1:100 version 
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