When I visited Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille, The Church did not yet exist.
Some places are discovered by chance and remembered forever.
When I visited Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille, The Church did not yet exist.
It was simply part of a birthday trip with my niece, Ana Seixas. We were staying in Belgium and decided to take a train to Lille to spend the day discovering a city neither of us knew. There was no research project, no list of churches and no intention of creating an archive. I was only travelling, photographing and sharing the day with her.
Perhaps that is why this visit now feels so important to me.
We found the cathedral while walking through Lille, and its façade immediately felt unlike the churches I was used to seeing. It was modern and restrained, almost unexpected. Inside, however, the scale, the silence and the height of the nave carried the atmosphere of a much older building. The cathedral seemed to exist between different periods of time.
The light was what held my attention most. Passing through the translucent façade, it entered the interior softly, without revealing where the stone ended and the brightness began. I photographed it because it was beautiful, without knowing that years later I would return to those images with a different way of looking.
Only after beginning The Church did I understand that I had already been collecting these moments for some time.
The project did not create this memory. It gave me a reason to revisit it.
Looking back, I think about that day with Ana, the train journey from Belgium, our curiosity about a new city and the freedom of having no plan beyond walking and discovering. The cathedral became part of the trip naturally, without either of us knowing how meaningful it would later become to me.
Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille took generations to reach its final form. Perhaps memories are built in a similar way. A moment happens first. Its meaning arrives later.
What stayed with me was not only the architecture, but the realization that some chapters begin long before we know we are writing them.
I remember stepping out of Lille Flandres station with Ana and wandering through streets we knew almost nothing about. When we finally reached the cathedral, the afternoon light was passing through the marble façade, making the entire front of the building seem to glow from within.
The cathedral feels suspended between centuries. The exterior speaks the language of modern architecture, while the interior carries the scale, silence and verticality of a Gothic church. I found myself watching how the light softened as it crossed the translucent façade before reaching the nave. More than a contrast, it felt like a conversation between different generations of builders.
I photographed the marble façade glowing in the afternoon light, the long central nave, architectural details around the choir and the way natural light moved through the interior spaces.
- Celebrant
- Archbishop Laurent Le Boulc’h
- Language
- French
- A detail
- The translucent marble façade that transforms daylight into a soft glow inside the cathedral.
- Built
- 1854
- Architect
- Charles Leroy; Charles de Béthune; Paul Vilain; Michel Vilain; Pierre-Louis Carlier. Contemporary façade developed with structural engineer Peter Rice.
- Style
- Gothic Revival with a contemporary translucent-marble façade.
- Order
- Diocesan clergy / No religious order
- Dedication
- Notre-Dame de la Treille / Our Lady of the Treille
Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille seems to contain more than one period of time within the same building. Its long nave, pointed arches and chapels belong to the ambition of a nineteenth-century Gothic revival, while the façade speaks in a language that is unmistakably modern.
The cathedral was built across generations, interrupted by limited resources and completed almost a century and a half after its foundation stone was laid. Instead of attempting to imitate the original nineteenth-century design, its final façade accepted the distance between those two moments. The translucent marble does not hide that the cathedral was finished in another age. It allows that difference to become part of the building.
This was also one of the churches I photographed before The Church existed. I visited Lille during a birthday trip with my niece, Ana Seixas. We had travelled to Belgium together and took a train across the border simply to discover the city. At the time, the cathedral was only one of the places we encountered along the way.
Looking back at the photographs now, it feels almost inevitable that this building would eventually become part of the archive. It is a place shaped by delayed completion, changing intentions and meanings that arrived over time. The visit happened first. The project came later.
The cathedral stands on the former feudal motte associated with the origins of Lille. It was conceived to restore and house the centuries-old devotion to Notre-Dame de la Treille after the destruction of the Collégiale Saint-Pierre during the French Revolution. The revered Marian statue was transferred to the new church in 1872. When the Diocese of Lille was created in 1913, the still-unfinished basilica became its cathedral. The entire building, including its provisional bell tower, was listed as a French Historic Monument in 2009.
Notre-Dame-de-la-Treille is the cathedral of the Archdiocese of Lille and a remarkable architectural composition developed over nearly a century and a half. Conceived in the nineteenth century as a monumental Gothic Revival church, it was built in successive stages before being completed in 1999 with a contemporary façade of translucent marble. The building combines the vertical scale, pointed arches and devotional spaces of Gothic architecture with a modern western front designed to transform natural light as it enters the nave.
Mass times to be confirmed.