Cleaning Parisian Facades

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In recent years, the city of Paris has made a concerted and successful effort to clean up its buildings, particularly major monuments. In the olden days, just about every building in the city was a mass of soot and grime; there was no requirement for building owners to clean their facades, and in typically French style, none of them ever felt any obligation to do so on their own initiatives. This changed when the city finally enacted ordinances requiring that facades be cleaned at least once per decade. The city practices what it preaches, too, by cleaning its own buildings. The national government chips in to clean the facades of national monuments.

Anyway, this is a picture of the western side of the Opéra Garnier as it appeared in November, 1999, right in the middle of a much-needed cleaning (the building had not been previously cleaned since its construction, as far as I know). The cleaning in this case was done by a company called Thomann-Hanry, which specializes in cleaning building facades using a patented process of some kind—I don’t know how their method works, but I see them cleaning stuff everywhere. However it is done, it works extremely well, as you can see here, and the results speak for themselves. On the right is the building as it appeared before cleaning; on the left, a large section of the building has just been scrubbed clean. As you can see, the cleaned building looks like new. The entire building was being cleaned in this way so that it would be pretty for the year 2000 (like most other monuments in Paris).

Some buildings, such as Notre-Dame Cathedral are so old that this type of scrubbing is hazardous to their health; in such cases, the government undertakes much more meticulous, expensive cleaning that produces similar results, but takes several years to complete.

Photographed on November 28, 1999.