The organizers of the competition to design a replacement spire for Notre Dame Cathedral, “even more beautiful than before” in President Macron’s words, might take a lesson from an incident that happened more than 300 years ago. In 1681 the architect Christopher Wren was commissioned to build a bell tower for the quadrangle of Christ Church College in Oxford. The original tower had never been completed. The college had been founded by Cardinal Wolsey 150 years earlier, and had been built in the castellated Late Gothic style that was then popular but which was now long out of fashion. Wren was the country’s leading classicist. What did he do? As he succinctly explained, the tower “ought to be Gothick to agree with the Founder’s worke.” Enough said.
