animation

Following its devastating 2019 fire, a ‘memory project’ began between architects and French woodworking artisans to research and disseminate knowledge of what was lost, in the form of scale models of the roof structure. ‘Notre-Dame de Paris: l’Art de la Charpente’ was born.

For this project, James produced a series of animated sequences explaining the artisans’ modelmaking process, based on recordings they shared with him.

James also dissected the theoretical context and implications of the 2019 disaster and of this scale-model reconstruction, from the point of view of intangible heritage.