In April 2019, fire tore through the roof of Notre-Dame de Paris and brought down its spire. That spring, a small team of Minecraft builders set out to rebuild the cathedral block by block, exactly as it stood before the flames. The timelapse has since passed 100,000 views. This is how it came together.
Why Notre-Dame
The project started with a Planet Minecraft contest, Preserving World Heritage, which asked builders to recreate real heritage sites. We chose Notre-Dame de Paris. Notre-Dame had already shaped countless cathedral builds across Minecraft and YouTube. After the fire, the choice made itself.
The cathedral
Notre-Dame de Paris, "Our Lady of Paris," is the Catholic cathedral on the Île de la Cité and one of the defining works of French Gothic architecture. Construction began in 1163, and the main structure took shape over the following century. The cathedral was damaged during the French Revolution in the 1790s and restored between 1844 and 1864 under architects Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. After the 2019 fire, a five-year reconstruction followed, and Notre-Dame reopened on December 7, 2024. The cathedral's official site: notredamedeparis.fr
How we built it
The goal was accuracy. Here is how the build came together.
- Research. We worked from floor plans and blueprint images of the cathedral, at 3:1 scale, three blocks for every meter. That made the cathedral nearly 400 blocks long, with towers over 200 blocks tall.
- Planning. We spent about 10 hours working out how to handle a structure this size and how to shoot the timelapse.
- Building. Over three days, 7 to 12 builders worked sessions of 5 to 8 hours each day.
- Detail. The focus was the exterior: the facade, towers, flying buttresses, and the detail that makes French Gothic read as French Gothic. The interior was outside what we could finish before the contest deadline.
- Release. We published the timelapse and a free schematic. The entry took second place in the contest's finalist round, and the schematic has been downloaded more than 6,000 times.
What came after?
We were still learning as we went. The habits the project built stayed with us: research the subject properly, plan before building, and sweat the details. Since then Sapphire Studios has grown to a team of around 20 creators with more than 300 products on the Minecraft Marketplace.
Download.
The original 2019 build is still available as a free schematic for Java Edition 1.12.2 on our Planet Minecraft page. https://www.planetminecraft.com/project/notre-dame-de-paris-preserving-world-heritage-contest/