Essay · Métiers du Toit
The Long Patience of Zinc, and the Roofs That Outlast Their Owners
A century after Haussmann pulled the medieval city down and re-roofed it in rolled metal, the silver-blue skyline of Paris is being quietly remade, sheet by sheet, by fewer than two hundred working couvreurs-zingueurs.
From the sixth floor of a building on rue Drouot, the rooftops of Paris read as a single material — a soft, overcast field of pale gray that the Belle Époque guidebooks insisted on calling "silver." It is not silver. It is rolled zinc, laid in long standing seams by hand over wooden battens, and what we are looking at, on any given Tuesday, is roughly eighty thousand individual roofs aging at slightly different rates.
"A zinc roof is a contract with the next century. You sign it once. The patina signs the rest."
What the patina is, exactly
The shine fades within a winter, then settles into the bluish chalk of patine stable.