Inside the $740 million restoration that resurrected Notre Dame Cathedral from the ashes

Years before Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral was damaged by fire, a handful of architecture enthusiasts had already set the stage for its eventual reconstruction.  In 2012, when he was an architecture student, Rémi Fromont re-created the cathedral’s charpente, or roof structure, on a sketch pad for class, notating each beam while donning a flashlight and headlamp. There’s a reason this part of the cathedral is nicknamed “the forest.” This attic superstructure was constructed of more than...