Four years ago this month, Notre-Dame de Paris, the 12th-century cathedral in the heart of Paris, caught on fire. The city was smothered in smoke for days, and hearts around the world were broken. Notre-Dame is a gem of gothic architecture, an incomparable beauty in the center of the city, and a site for pilgrimage and tourism. As the cathedral smoldered, the city of Paris pledged to rebuild it as it was. But the mayor had also set forth a plan to make Paris the greenest city in Europe by 2030, and realized that redoing the landscape around Notre-Dame in a more ecological manner could help Paris reach that goal. In September 2021, the city launched a pro-environment design competition for the site, and last summer, the jury selected a team led by our guest today, the award-winning Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets, who has specialized in taking hyper-urban, often desolate sites and turning them into eco-friendly oases. For Notre-Dame, he and his colleagues will use the same approach for the surrounding landscape–the parvis, as the West side plaza is known, and the gardens to the east. Their proposal will turn the Île de la Cité, the island in the Seine where Notre-Dame sits, into a sustainable microclimate. Bas is here on The Green Dream today to explain to us how they will do it.
