After the Notre-Dame fire, archaeologists made an amazing discovery: the Parisian church is the first building of its kind in which iron brackets held the stones in place. This gave the architects completely new possibilities.
From
Hubert Filser
In April 2019, when the fire ripped through the roof of Notre-Dame in Paris and brought down the distinctive crossing tower, Maxime L’Héritier probably would not have thought that years later this massive destruction would lead to a surprising realization: namely that, that the master builders of the cathedral were far more innovative in their construction than previously thought. The Parisian archaeologist was sitting on the metro when a friend called him and told him about the disaster, and a little later his train crossed the Seine with a view of the flames.