I spent two weeks last winter walking the western civic quarter before breakfast, when the cornices still held rain and the pavement had not yet brightened. The finest elevations were not clean. Their authority came from contrast: washed ledges, blackened recesses, and small shell specks catching the first dull light.
Patina is a public record
Restoration committees often speak as if stone has one correct colour, somewhere between new milk and a museum label. The better lesson is harsher and more useful: a building earns its face through weather, smoke, repair, and the disciplined refusal to polish every scar away.
That is why the new archive wing should keep its dark plinth and cut only the inscriptions back to warm stone. A city does not need more spotless monuments; it needs surfaces that can hold memory without pretending innocence.