This is NOT a serious a proposal for the reconstruction of Notre Dame. This is an act of creative one-upmanship designed to ridicule every remaining, rapacious architectural firm still circling the carcass of Notre Dame with an “idea” for a new roof proposal. This is NOT a serious design, but instead a flippant artwork painstakingly and lovingly designed to exhaust the audience’s patience. Extinguishing any remaining curiosity to review yet another starchitect’s superfluous proposal for a new glass eco-roof. As an artist and designer I understand the immortal appeal of conjuring the winning proposal. Devising the golden ticket and adhering your name for eternity to one of humanity’s most beloved bastions of architectural heritage. I confess my first impulse was also to dream up a new design. Nevertheless I realized Notre Dame deserves better than I can create. Better than any-one single creator can possibly imagine. A “better” proposal for the reconstruction of Notre Dame by definition requires a design that can represent not the vision of one but the thirst for resolution of the millions whose heart shrunk with the flames. A “better” proposal for Notre Dame must constitute an exorcism of communal pain and require a group sacrifice. A sacrifice of every architect and designer’s artistic ego and impulse to create and claim the cathedral as their own. A sacrifice from every person who wishes to erase the pain of history and revert the cathedral to its former glory. Notre dame’s roof must be left unfinished. Open to the skies, the rain and the conditions. Like Rome or Greece’s battered monuments, France too could embrace history and bear with pride it’s new wound. Notre Dame should be left open as a symbol of communal sacrifice. A nation’s choice to designate the billion dollars in funds raised for the cathedral’s reconstruction to the future of France’s youth. A symbol of courage to kiss the past goodbye and construct the future. And a new example from France to the world that we must all stand for liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Only a country of France’s incredibly vast cultural heritage could afford to voluntarily loose of one of its most cherished monuments. Make this sacrifice a historic one to commemorate the time France chose to invest in its people and its future over its past. I challenge every architect and designer in the world to attempt to conceive any design solution that could surpass the call for communal and symbolic sacrifice. I can assure you they will lose their time, as it is not conceptually or mathematically possible. Drop your pens, let this proposal go and focus your creativity on something else. The world needs your ideas. Notre Dame does not. Besides: after seeing this beautifully ridiculous rocket launch-pad? How could your design compete? It’s of the exact size of the steeple; it includes Tintin’s red and white squares. The design projects history into the future, replaces religion for science, and transports its visitors to heaven while simultaneously reigniting the commemorative flames that once brought Parisians together... (Talk about a winning concept.)

Let it go.

Leave Notre Dame open, unfinished. Invest those funds in the future. Invest in the youth.

Sebastian Errazuriz.