December 9, 2024 - 10:00am
At the weekend, Notre Dame cathedral in Paris celebrated its first Mass in five years, after it was severely damaged in a 2019 fire. In a ceremony attended by international figures including Prince William and Donald Trump, the world celebrated the restoration of this ancient, sacred, and iconic building.
How did they do it so quickly? It’s generally assumed these days that any major construction project will take years, perhaps decades, with wild cost overruns and infinitely ramifying bureaucracy. Take, for example, the Lower Thames Crossing bridge planning application. As of January this year, it already runs to more than 350,000 pages and a cost of £300 million; the final planning decision, which had been set for June 2024, has now been delayed to May next year.
Nor is this just a matter of lean, efficient French bureaucrats (lol, as the kids say) in contrast with British bureaucratic bloat. In February this year France’s state energy firm, EDF, announced planning delays for the construction of new nuclear reactors; meanwhile construction on the Seine-Nord Europe Canal only broke ground in September this year after more than two decades of delays. Nor is it just Europe compared to lean, efficient America (lol, lmao): California’s proposed high-speed rail line was first approved in 2008, but so far despite spending billions all the state has to show for it is a 0.3-mile section of bridge that goes nowhere.
Everyone in the construction industry clearly now just assumes this is how things work. Writing about the cathedral restoration in 2021, one haulage machinery firm guessed that “even with computer-generated 3D modelling and the use of modern building materials, the reconstruction effort could stretch into decades.” They weren’t the only ones guessing decades.
So how was it possible to restore Notre Dame in five years, when new nuclear plants, bridge crossings, canals, and railway lines seem paralysed across the West by bureaucratic executive dysfunction? The answer is that it’s not the actual construction which is the problem. Builders and tradesmen are, generally speaking, paid per job and hence good at getting on with things once the brief is agreed. What causes paralysis is agreeing on a plan for the work.
There are two linked reasons for this: one aesthetic and one political. Firstly, the artistic sensibility that commands high status among the type of information-class elites usually tasked with creating such plans is repugnant to the general public. Thus buildings and infrastructure in this style — think glass and steel, hostile boxes, weird lines and so on — tend to be unpopular, and have to be imposed de haut en bas.
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SubscribeWas it an arson attack? I thought it was just an accident during renovations?
I’d imagine ‘you know who’ burnt it down but they’ll never tell us that
If you believe that, I have an iceberg to sell you. It was yet another case of “Spontaneous Ecclesiastical Combustion”.
Yes, but what evidence is there, as opposed to speculation?
This is a good article, and the central thesis could be expanded upon. As someone working professionally in delivering construction projects, the key drivers of both cost and delay are:
Lack of a clear scope supported by all relevant stakeholders at the outsetChanging requirements throughout the projectSlow decision-making for time-critical decisions
These are evidenced in the HS2 debacle at Euston, which would now be approaching completion had the government merely stuck to the original design & construction plan.
Euston was selected as the HS2 terminus because the station already needed rebuilding anyway. This created a two-phase design – the initial (2026) HS2 station & the full (2033) rebuild. A two-phase design allowed the HS2 station (largely on new land) to start while design on the classic station rebuild progressed. In an attempt to ‘cut costs’ the government then decided they wanted a single-phase design. This meant throwing the two-phase design that was already finished in the bin, and starting again. It also delayed when HS2 services could actually start, prolonging the construction programme and increasing costs.
Then the govt decided they wanted over-site development to recoup further costs of construction, necessitating a reduction in the number of HS platforms from 11 to 10 – which in turn meant that when HS2 actually operates, the operating margin to avoid disruption has been removed. And it meant another design, and throwing the previous one away.
Then Rishi Sunak turned up and said that actually HS2 would only go to Birmingham and Euston would have to be privately financed – more oversite development, not enough platforms to actually run a service to Manchester, and another design, with even more delay.
The moral of this story, and the systemic error that clients do not seem to be capable of heeding, is that once construction has started it is almost impossible to save time or money, and that efforts to do so will not only fail but will be actively counterproductive. Had the govt followed this philosophy, we’d be 18 months away from HS2 starting to Birmingham, with services to Manchester and Leeds well in hand.
Agree a design, agree a budget & then build the damn thing as quickly as possible.
Well said!
If you want to understand the lot of the average project manager, the film ‘Pentagon Wars’ summed it up brilliantly: Pentagon Wars – Bradley Fighting Vehicle Evolution
Large IT projects seem to be similar.
Having worked on a large logistics project that needed to be synchronised with a new warehouse facility that was under construction, you are absolutely correct. Decide what you’re going to do; test your workflows; work out what it will cost; then JFDI.
People do already understand bridges, railways, power stations? More than they do Cathedrals? Perhaps the restoration of the Cathedral enjoyed the advantages of being an academic occupation free from the earnest of need and of making mistakes. It was play first.
Some good points.
From an engineering and construction point of view, none of these projects should take anywhere like as long as they do (not cost what they do). We have resources and capabilities those who built the cathedrals and railways could never have imagined. So we might also ask why Notre Dame took as long as 5 years. There would have been complete records of the structure and we ought – in theory – to be able to build a lot faster than the original mediaeval builders. Yes, some of the stonework skills are probably in short supply these days. But we have cranes and robots, 3D design software and simulators.
But what we also have is a huge swathe of overhead and an army of well-funded people with time on their hands dedicated to stopping things happening. Whether that’s under the guise of “safety”, “fighting climate change”, “saving the countryside” or “protecting the environment”. Yes, just for once I’m with Angela Rayner – people’s interests count for more than those of newts and bats.
What I hadn’t realised until reading this was that many of these people are actually on the payroll of the very companies and organisations tasked with doing the work. And principally, the managers. And what is the incentive for – let’s say – a manager on HS2 to prioritise cost or time saving over security – he knows the project is a one off (the UK only does one off projects now), so he might as well string it out as long as possible.
I’m sure it’s no coincidence that tech startups have a much higher ratio of doers to managers than mature companies and organisations.
And I’m not sure that’d I’d put these blockers into the “information class” as Mary Harrington does. There’s got to be a better group name for such people.
Beta blockers?
Most Project staff on jobs like HS2 do want to save money and deliver a good project. The difficulty is the constraints they operate under and the poor decisions of the ultimate client (in this case, the government).
HS2 is a great example – it’s being routed via the M40 corridor so it can serve Old Oak Common (and then, Heathrow). But that only makes sense if the line is going north of Birmingham (which it no longer is). Because going through the Chilterns necessitates lots of tunnelling it was seen as more efficient to tunnel most of the way through London, despite the fact there’s an old rail route on the surface (next to the Central Line) that could be re-used. Once the programme devolved into a stop-start mess any efficiency was lost so now it’s costing more to tunnel than lay surface route.
Serving Heathrow was never a feasible (or frankly necessary) goal, as it relied on direct connections to both Manchester and Leeds as well as approving the third runway. But these were not decisions of the people tasked with designing & building it, but of those government officials and MPs who specified the job in the first place.
I agree, I use ‘professionals’. I own a largish listed building and work in construction. Professionals (geologists, naturalists, architects, planners, engineers, archaeologists) and their office support have a massive impact on slowing everything down and driving costs up. Until say the 70s the largest costs in any project were labour wages and materials, now far overtaken (in larger projects) by bureaucratic costs and professional fees. The larger the project, the worse the wages/materials: fees/bureaucracy ratio.
The central proposition in this project was to rebuild in restorative fashion using essentially the same materials and techniques as the original. Even in the UK that would not raise any issue under the Planning Acts. It would require “just” a Listed Building application to the planners who love a perfect restoration. All we’d need to worry about would be envisioning and project managing the process plus assembling a team of heroic craftsmen and labourers.
But being old enough to remember the world before it was reconstructed to place Britain in “the West” though, I’m not sure that this French achievement will do much more for us than inspire quiet envy. We have our own unique disadvantages, the main one being density of population with all the consequent conflicts that entails over resource allocation, including resultant widespread demoralisation. Can we fell 1200 mature English oak trees in the way the French sourced theirs without apparent outcry? Can we source replacement stone (our original quarries are virtually all gone – and remember the fuss over the French marble used at the British Museum)? Do we have thousands of craftsmen and women we can enlist? Should we import skilled labour from wherever we can find it, and how will we house them in London? Should taxpayer money be spent so generously on a Christian place of worship and what about other faiths?
The answer to each of these questions is “no”. Our economy has been hollowed out by massive deskilling and reliance on imported labour and materials. We’re terrified of falling out over cultural issues. And we’re almost as skint as France.
Much easier to envision a modernist bridge or a diminutive super-fast railway (to keep up with the French). On our present trajectory that’s not changing any time soon.
While I agree with your analysis of planning/environmental laws the claim of our workforce being hollowed out doesn’t hold true. 2 of the 25 carpenters who did the woodwork restoration on ND were British. We were one of the first countries that France asked for help. Why are you doing down British craftsmanship? We have lots of skilled craftsmen doing work here and abroad and have a high international reputation for historic restoration (partly due to our “restrictive” listed building environment).
Then why does your country continue to import the people who, as I am told in the US, will do the jobs that natives won’t? Apparently, you have plenty of natives who can and will do such jobs. We managed to do those jobs ourselves, too, in the past. Govt action creates perceptions like Jane’s.
Completely separate issue: one of importing workers to do low-skilled jobs, rather than craftsmen. I’d have thought that was pretty obvious.
And don’t forget the road cones, even if they are not needed.
Indeed! This timely restoration caught my attention as well. I’m not sure if it is fair to compare all these construction paradigms but there certainly seems to be something fishy about this thing where the West can’t get anything done in the real world anymore.
We see it in the housing market as well. Many urban areas in Western countries are dealing with extreme shortages of affordable housing, which actually pushes people into homelessness. Every country has their own excuses of why building is suddenly next to impossible; zoning, environmental laws, NIMBY-terror, sudden shortages of materials and personnel, you name it. But it is not hard to imagine that there are actually (semi-conscious) financial interests that have an incentive to frustrate markets because in some perverted way that is profitable in a world where everything is a financial bubble. Even if it means driving people into literal homelessness.
I remain unimpressed. 5 years just to restore partially damaged one building? Chinese erect an entire functional hospital in one year. But even closer home I’d find hard to believe that a private condo would take longer than a few months to restore after a severe fire
A year to build a hospital? All those involved will need to be exiled to Xinjiang for “reprogramming”.
Possibly but technical achievement is still here
Also correction: not 1 year, it’s rather 10 days (https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/coronavirus-china-huoshenshan-hospital-photos-1.5450026 )
Oh for goodness sake, do you have any idea of the research and sourcing of materials that went into the restoration of ND? Just one example: the roof timbers had to be sourced from a very selective type of wood to match the originals, and it wasn’t even known if those types of timbers were still being grown. Failure to do so might have caused tension issues as the new wood was integrated into the existing, still viable, timbers. Almost every aspect of the restoration had similar care.
Only a philistine would imagine that’s comparable to throwing up a utilitarian building.
But wouldn’t the money have been better spent on protecting “Notre NHS”?
It’s generally assumed these days that any major construction project will take years, perhaps decades, with wild cost overruns and infinitely ramifying bureaucracy. ——–> That’s what happens when there is no incentive for completing projects in a timely fashion and where there is no sanction for failing to do so. That’s the difference between public and private projects. The luxury of using other people’s money gives the money itself a completely different look. People are far more careful about using their own funds than they are when spending someone else’s.
It’s worth checking out the speed with which our ancestors managed to put up the Crystal Palace!
Excellent piece. This deserves a good circulation.