It was literally a speculative design. These things happen a lot in architecture. They lay the way for future projects even if they themselves will never be built. They are rebuilding the roof exactly as it was...

> pretend other artistic movements and styles are also some type of socio-political movement

Pretend? It's literally in the first sentence of the wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk

"combination of lowlife and high tech" ... juxtaposed with societal collapse or decay

Citation: Thomas Michaud, "Science fiction and politics: Cyberpunk science fiction as political philosophy"

It does not get more political than that.

Have you seen the reference you are talking about?

https://www.dezeen.com/2019/05/09/notre-dame-roof-vincent-ca...

I see nothing smug there, just a smart and appropriate upgrade. It fits seamlessly onto the rest of the structure, while the former roof was just a boring affair.

Restoring a historical object and making deliberate, unnecessary alterations is perverse. If the bottom half of the Mona Lisa was destroyed in a fire would you find it acceptable for the conservator to paint her in a blazer?

I don't care about Mona Lisa. Like I also don't care about many things other people seem to care about. They could tear down Cologne Cathedral and I'd shrug. Back to Paris, I think the Eiffel Tower and Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou is more relevant to me, than a place built to worship something which I'm considering a cargo cult. But that's just me.

> artistic movements and styles are also some type of socio-political movement

Cyberpunk was social and political commentary from the start. Solarpunk is too, but feels less genuine. It feels like a corporate feel-good aesthetic designed for pharmaceutical television commercials hocking anti-depressants.

I've never seen much in the way of social or political commentary from steampunk. Steampunk is extremely kitsch. It looks cool, but there's not much more to it than looking cool and invoking pseudo-nostalgia for the 19th century. At best you get some weak commentary about 19th century colonialism and industrialization chewing people up, but mostly this genre is about glorifying the Victorian/Industrial style.

To me it feels absolutely anti corporate, even if that twee cartoon was a from a corporate ad. Solarpunk is about conceptualising new ways to invent the future. It's not kitsch like steampunk. It seems like the early days of a movement that could become extremely influential, and I think pushing that idea forward could lead to positive things in the future. Let's reserve our cynicism for things that need it and push these ideas as far as they can go.

That redesign looks pretty cool tbh

Sure does. They should go build it. Somewhere other than on top of the eight hundred and sixty year old cathedral.

Why? The original roof is lost, and while we can painstaking recreate it, it still won't be the same roof. So why can't we upgrade such a historical landmark to be a beacon of the future?

Is that a serious question? The same reason we don't add dairy cows to cave drawings or put shiplap on the great wall of China or conduct civil war reenactments with predator drones . It's a historical landmark.

Na, the part that’s left is a historical landmark. The huge gaping hole in the roof is whatever we like it to be.

okay but why not just take down the entire thing and make something even cooler

Because that would be destroying history. Filling in a fire-made gap with something new is no more intrusive to the building than a restoration that bears all the hallmarks of this era anyway.

It is no more a destruction of history than to intentionally make it different than it was. It isnt ideal to need to repair it, but the more we can preserve the effect on our senses (sight) of the original the better.

If you fundamentally alter the way it looks, it is no longer a historical reference. It is something new, albeit with an interesting history / story.

If you redesign it, you should also rename it.

When something is repaired to the best of our ability, the future can look back on it and understand the context that we were trying to make it as it was - and all the hallmarks of this era will be identifiable as the minimum amount.

If we redesign it, we make it more about us and our current time. the future will likely be able to redesign it better, so it's just going to look like an ugly patch that is way too extra.

If we prefer to make the building about us and our current time, we should just destroy the entire thing and rebuild it from scratch as a full redesign.

The idea that we can make preservation repairs will be exposed as a fallacy a few decades after we've tried, when it becomes clear that our objectivity at the time was just regular hidebound contemporary trend following. Might as well embrace it and make something cool.