How the Paris Opening Ceremony Resurrected A Long Lost Memory
and likely yours too
The opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics was an explosion of Parisian stereotypes, some not as well executed as some.
Through the deluge of social media posts rating and reviewing the event, a video popped up with a fun fact that I had completely forgotten about until that moment.
And it had everything to do with this familiar hooded figure:
Assassin’s Creed was my adolescent-hood, particularly Assassin’s Creed Unity, which takes place in revolutionary era Paris.
The actual gameplay was delicious, but what drew me in was the accuracy of the Parisian city. I remember people would play Unity just to see what Paris looked like in lieu of actually going there. It was immersive AI before that even came to be.
Back in 2014 when Unity first came out, there were subreddits saying the map of Paris was so accurate that people used it to look up places to go in Paris prior to traveling there.
Ubisoft's dedication to historical accuracy in their games has always been impressive. They employ a small army of historians and artists to get the details just right. It's part of what drew me to the series in the first place as a lover of history.
In the game, our hooded figure is often perched atop or hidden inside famous Parisian landmarks surveying the streets below, including the Notre Dame.
This brings us to the fun fact I had forgotten until the opening ceremony brought it rushing back…that the Notre Dame was rebuilt using Assassin’s Creed Unity’s renderings of the Notre Dame.
Or at least I was led to believe this was fact until I researched it and discovered otherwise.
On April 15, 2019 the Notre Dame Cathedral that survived Nazi occupation, was reduced to an ashen skeleton by a fire.
Smoke was seen coming from the top of Notre Dame Cathedral at 6:30 pm, by 7:05 Parisians watched in horror as their holiest monument went up in flames.
The 96 foot tall spire topped and the cathedral’s famous gargoyles melted like candle wax.
Ubisoft did pledge €500,000 to help rebuild the cathedral and sent over all its renderings of Notre Dame in assistance.
But Assassin’s Creed did not rebuild Notre Dame. This guy did.
Enter Dr. Andrew Tallon. Art professor and gothic lover.
Enter Dr. Andrew Tallon, an art professor with a passion for Gothic architecture. In a twist of fate, Tallon's obsession with Notre Dame would prove crucial in ways he never imagined.
Tallon was obsessed with Gothic architecture and during a trip to Paris in 2015, he scanned 45 Gothic buildings, with Notre Dame being one of them.
Tallon meticulously scanned Notre Dame using LiDAR technology, capturing every nook and cranny of the cathedral. Little did he know that his work would become invaluable just four years later when fire devastated the iconic structure.
His scans were so thorough and impressive that 23 other European countries requested to do similar scans for their historic buildings in case of a catastrophe.
His labor of love would help resurrect the world famous holy monument once more.
But, life is a folly.
Dr. Tallon would never know the impact his Gothic passions had on Notre Dame and the world, because he sadly passed away from brain cancer 6 months before the fire.
Tallon often visited Notre Dame growing up and filled notebooks with doodles and questions pondering how was this marvel built? There aren’t accurate architectural blueprints of Notre Dame that show every detail. So in some ways it was an architectural mystery. A mystery that Tallon would solve.
Tallon’s childhood interests only grew with age and ultimately became a professor at Vassar College teaching art and architecture, but decoding Notre Dame was always in the back of his mind.
He soon was convinced the only way to unravel the cathedral’s secrets was to measure every inch of the monument using LiDAR.
From his scans, the architecture that lay beneath was revealed, which contradicted the known history of Notre Dame.
For instance, there were accounts that Notre Dame’s famous flying buttresses were added later for support. But the scans showed otherwise. There was no movement in the upper walls, meaning the buttresses were there from the very beginning.
Tallon was granted permission to scan Notre Dame in 2015, just 4 years before the doomed fire. The same here, he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and passed on November 18, 2018 at 49 years old.
It's a bittersweet story that reminds us how our passions can have far-reaching impacts. While Assassin's Creed didn't rebuild Notre Dame, it's fascinating to see how the virtual and real worlds of Paris intertwined, from video games to Olympic ceremonies to the preservation of iconic landmarks through unexpected sources.
Thank you for enjoying this free post. You can expect more topics and articles like this from Today I Learned Science x 10! Consider becoming a paid subscriber to access full articles, expert interviews and more. And you just might want to do that sooner than later because an upcoming post will be an interview with the archeologist featured in the Netflix documentary ‘Terracotta Warriors’. You are NOT going to want to miss that. Trust me!