Translated by Ross Smith — 7 years ago. Today I'm going to tell you about the second part of my trip to France that I went on at the beginning of November you can read the first part here. After spending the week in Nantes and exhibiting the projects that we completed in the workshop, we took the car and went to spend the weekend in Paris.
Despite the journey from Nantes to Paris being only 4 hours, we decided to treat ourselves, after all we are architecture students, and make a stop in the city of Chartres whose cathedral is one of the greatest Gothic French works and is studied in every and each architecture school in the world, whatever the country may be.
What I'm going to say could perhaps be counted as blasphemy in the world of architecture, but I enjoyed the small and unknown cathedral in Nantes a lot more than the famous cathedral in Chartres.
This is thanks to what we found, which was necessary but annoying at the same time: restoration works. Half of the great main nave was found full of scaffolding, so the perception of the giant and Gothic styled area was shortened.
Also, a big part of the church had already been completely restored, so the dark, medieval stones which had been battered over the course of time, a testament of the works of the ancient foremen, ancestors to the building that stands today, had been replaced by clean and white walls that didn't at all give the same feeling of "historical vertigo" that is usually produced by the monuments that are hundreds of years old.
