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The color of Paris
The color of Paris is grey - this idea came to my mind of contemplating the city one Sunday morning from the roof of the Sacre Coeur Basilica.
Was it because of the weather, the architecture, or my mood, I wondered?
In comparison with red, the gray color is definitely less emotional. It is detached and neutral. I wear it when I want to be unnoticed, discrete, and classic.
From a color psychology context, gray is the color of compromise - being neither black nor white, it is the transition between two non-colors. The closer gray gets to black, the more dramatic and mysterious it becomes. The closer it gets to silver or white, the more illuminating and lively it is.
So in the meaning of color, conservative and elegant, - grey suits Paris well.
Place de la Concorde, the Louvre, Les Invalides, the Palais-Bourbon, the Haussmannian buildings, Opera Garnier, and many other Parisian symbols have one thing in common. It is actually the basic material they are made of, – the white-grey limestone. Unfortunately in the XVII century, the Paris quarries where the stone was taken began to collapse under the feet of the inhabitants (everything has its limits).
Eventually they started to look for the limestone deposits elsewhere. The place was quickly found. It was the village of Saint-Maximin miles from Paris. The stone there was judged to be of very good quality, easy to extract, and resistant to bad weather.
The history of the limestone begins more than 40 million years ago when the sea that covered the Paris basin begins to recede. Two thousand years ago, the first quarries were underground: wet, the stone was softer, and it is used in particular to build the thermal baths of Cluny in Paris.
The Romans opened the ports on the river to transport the blocks extracted from the quarry of Saint-Maximin towards the urban centers. They use it to build the Roman Forum (today in Latin Quarter)
Believe it or not but the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Stanford University in California, the Tiffany Garden in Tokyo, and the colonnade of the National Assembly is made of the limestone brought from France, taken near Paris!
The catacombs of Paris is a great example of extraction of the limestone and formation afterward of the underground tunnels which are 300 hundred km long! Some of them are open to the public today.
To sum up, grayish, as Paris appeared to me that day is quite a subjunctive impression, I agree. Othewise, could be the long marriage of the limestone and the pollution or the rainy weather and appropriate mood.
Who knows…I would let you my dear reader make your own conclusions and ideas visiting the city.
And what color is your city, by the way?
