My Notre Dame and an Interview with Clair Marie Wholean, AIA, LEED,AP, BD+C of Archifina

April 29, 2019

My Notre Dame and an Interview with Clair Marie Wholean, AIA, LEED,AP, BD+C of Archifina

Notre Dame, December 1986

So, I am going to just touch on Notre Dame and what it means to me as far as a wife, mother and architect and just post what I have said on a few other posts about it.

The first time that I went to Notre Dame was while I was studying abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark. My friend Jeanette and I took a train to the Schiphol Airport outside of Amsterdam and to meet my then arch student boyfriend/now husband and her then planning student boyfriend/now fb friend. We took the train into Paris, where it was raining and took the metro into the Latin Quarter armed with "Let's Go Europe!" looked for a hotel that was listed, as it rained... and of course the hotel was booked (because it was in "Let's Go Europe!" and because it was a cheap, dumpy hotel, that was the only reason that it would be fully booked) So we walked around for awhile and then my boyfriend saw a nice hotel and said let's just look there and he found out that they had two rooms available but they were like twice as expensive as the ones we were looking at and my friend's boyfriend said, "ok, let's go!' and my friend said, "When are we going to stop listening to him?" about my boyfriend. and we only stayed for one night there and then went to another hotel that was pretty bad, so bad that we had to move to another hotel (we were listening to her) and then there was a night with a lot of beer in a cafe and a bidet and that's all I am going to tell you about that trip, except!!!!

That we saw Notre Dame and because I took all of my photos on slide film with a Nikon FG (black body of course) camera, I can only find this one image of the cathedral taken from Pont Neuf.

The second time I saw it, it was in the Spring on our program's Amsterdam-Paris Study Tour and besides totally overtaking another small dumpy hotel with our whole studio, and going to see La Defense and being late to a tour of it (that's not surprising, is it???, I had an excellent excuse, btw) I spent a lot of time by myself in the city, as I tend to do when I really want to focus on things. I also went to my favorite museum, the Musee d'Orsay on that rip, recommended by one of my fellow classmates as being the best museum that he had ever seen (he was the wise old age of 22), so I took his advice and went to see it and I will admit, he was right.

However, many years later when I was going to see my daughter at the end of her semester abroad in Spain, I had told her that I would take her to Paris, so she had forgone the trip with her friends. I even bought the tickets from Copenhagen to Paris, but it was cutting it close and I was worried about spending more money in Paris at a hotel, because I did not want to stay at a dumpy hotel because I had told myself that the next time that I went to Europe (there are many valid reasons for why I didn't go back til then also, btw) I was not going to stay in dumpy hotels or youth hostels (they were not as nice as the ones you see today). So, as I was laying in the lower bunk of my danish sister's son's firetruck bed with my daughter above me, I said, "I think we are going to have to curtail this trip til the next time."

Of course, this coming December will be the thirty-third year since I went with my boyfriend and it will have been five years since I went to Europe to see and bring home my daughter.

And of course, we will not see the Notre Dame that her dad and I experienced together.
And I apologized to her for that when I saw the burning spire come falling down.

And her dad would not watch any of the news footage of that part of our lives burning down.

So, I think what I have to say about this is:
Any time spent with your loved ones is valuable and while Notre Dame and Paris are wonderful places to take your friend, lover, spouse and children, (well, maybe not all at the same time) not taking them will not be the end of the world. I can say that as a mother of three who took their kids everywhere as a stay-at-home mother and architect, they will bring up a lot of times in their lives that have no tie to any architectural or locational moment, it is the love that they have experienced spending time with you that they will remember and that could be anywhere.

My kids have been many places that are architectural because their dad and I are both architects and have always scheduled famous buildings into our vacations. My husband's grandparents in Mason City, Iowa had lived in a Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney house (the Schneider House) on the Glen so we visited that because it was part of the family's history as he had spent a lot of his formative years there and on visits to see my parents who now outside of Joplin, Missouri, we have seen and stayed at the Price Tower with them, seen the Nelson Atkins Museum, seen the Crystal Bridges Museum and the Wright's Bachman-Wilson House and the Mildred B. Cooper Chapel (the other chapel) by Fay Jones so these are just great architecture along the way when we have travelled to see friends and family. However, one can easily take their children to a park or around town and still make memories. I love the fact that our kids know more about architecture and make keen observations about it than the average person,

"You know how some buildings have a lot of stuff going on? It's like they are worried they will never get another project so they have to put everything in this one"

And

"why is the metal on that building so wavy and not like the metal in your project?"

because even though they are not going into architecture, they are our future. And so many of their memories are not tied to UNESCO World Heritage sites as they are tied to their parents being with them.

And like I said in Bob's blog,

"My daughter used my post on Instagram about Notre Dame in her Instagram story, so she must have forgiven me and still love me."

"Life of an Architect": Notre Dame- A Tragic Fire

Me:
I guess it shouldn’t come as any surprise the feelings that we as architects and anyone for that matter, have for great architecture, I mean this is what we strive for in our work, to (hopefully) create an emotional response from people who experience the space we create.i went to see Notre Dame when I studied abroad in 1986-87, the first was with my then boyfriend/now husband and the second was with our class study tour where we were pretty much just given free reign to go where we wanted to besides a tour of La Defense that one of our instructors had helped design. Almost five years ago my daughter was studying in Spain and I said that I would come and visit at the end and that we would go to Paris, well I went but we didn’t go to Paris because it was going to be more time and more money and needless to say it was a different economy but I figured, “well it’s Paris, it will always be there” of course my experience the past couple years had taught me that things won’t always be the same and I sent.her a text message yesterday telling her that I was sorry that we didn’t go to Paris and she said, it’s ok, and then she sent me an Instagram story of me posting an old photo of Notre Dame (shot with a Nikon FG on slide film btw, and the matgeo one right after, with “who posted first @michelegracehottel or @natgeo? Love her

Bob:
We all know that the purpose of that building was to evoke emotions from the people who visited - get them to behold the greatness of the Lord. I wonder if they knew back in the 12th Century that these buildings could bring out an entirely different set of emotions that weren't tied to a person's faith or a belief in a higher power.

Me:
Ues, (Yes) as most cathedral spaces do and that was not a new typology, just building on the prototype, I would venture to say that they knew that it would create that emotion, based on architects that I know who Design sacred spaces but adamantly claim that they have no religious or spiritual beliefs, lol! I am actually thinking that the Salk has some of these same qualities as far as the axis with symmetrical spaces off of the courtyard and a focal point with the ocean and looking to the sky above.

Anne Fougeron of Fougeron Architecture Blog Post

Me:
Thank you for these thoughts Anne! I was supposed to take my daughter to Paris while we were in Europe and there wasn’t the time, now I feel like there should always be the time...

So, there is a lot of classical architecture in Paris and Notre Dame but there is also a lot of classical or Neo-Classical architecture in the United States designed and built on these principals and some of the newer reasons of why we can appreciate these older buildings. We talk about some of them in this interview with

Clair Marie Wholean

AIA LEED AP BD+C

Founding Principal of Archfina

Clair Marie has completed over 40 built projects in the US and abroad. Prior to founding Archfina, Clair Marie established her career at SOM New York, SmithGroup DC and award-winning small firms in New York, Baltimore and DC. Her early career focused on schools, hospitals, historic buildings and environmentally sustainable design. Her practice now includes net zero design, zoning consulting, historic renovations, and building science research.

Clair Marie believes that neither traditionalism nor modernism is the epitome of good design; but the artful nurturance of the old alongside the new brings a richness greater than each alone. Her overall goal is to improve the quality of the built environment in a systemic, measurable way for future generations. Clair Marie is originally from Madison, Wisconsin and is honored to be a fourth-generation architect.

Interview with Clair Marie Wholean of Archfina

The Buildings that Clair Marie talks about: