Sun Tower Dome Before Copper Restoration, Vancouver

The green dome of Vancouver's Sun Tower at 128 West Pender Street spent decades convincing people it was copper. In April 2018, when this photograph was taken, the roof was still the original 1912 terracotta, painted turquoise to resemble the patina of aged copper.

It was a very successful disguise. Even heritage documentation occasionally described the dome as copper. A 2004 photograph in the Canadian Register of Historic Places is captioned "the hexagonal dome, with its copper roof." Vancouver knew the roof by its colour and apparently stopped asking what was underneath.

By 2016, the question had become unavoidable. The original tiles were reaching the end of their useful life, and an approved conservation plan initially called for restoring or replacing the terracotta in kind. The owners proposed something more radical: remove the clay roof and remake its exact profile in heavy sheet copper.

That proposal went before the Vancouver Heritage Commission on October 24, 2016. The minutes are unusually revealing. The Commission unanimously accepted the material change, noting that the turquoise colour itself had become a character-defining feature of the Sun Tower. They wanted the replacement copper to age toward the same colour.

So Vancouver ended up preserving a fake copper roof by making it genuinely copper and waiting for nature to reproduce the fake.

Actually building it took some effort. There was no off-the-shelf copper shingle matching the old terracotta. Heather & Little took samples from the Sun Tower and made new tooling around their profile. Some 4,580 old tiles became the pattern for replacements stamped from roughly 20,000 pounds of 99.9-percent copper. Four coppersmiths came west from Ontario for a seven-month installation.

The work underneath was less visible and considerably more modern. The copper shingles were carried on a custom stainless-steel support grid with neoprene pads intended to give the roof some seismic independence. The gutter was also reproduced in copper. The cupola received standing-seam copper.

Fresh copper changed the skyline in a way restoration usually tries to avoid. The newly finished dome appeared brown, closer in colour to the unpainted terracotta of 1912 than to the green roof Vancouver had spent most of a century recognizing. Time was now part of the specification. Rain and air would have to finish the job.

That makes this 2018 photograph a useful record of an architectural imposture just before it disappeared. The uneven turquoise, dark joints and old ceramic tiles belong to the version of the Sun Tower that convinced generations of Vancouverites they were looking at weathered metal.

The replacement finally made the material story accurate. Fresh copper came out brown, leaving Vancouver to wait for the weather to make the familiar green roof again.