“In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.” What the young Jean Cocteau wrote in relation to Les Six may well also apply to Norman Foster: after six decades of raising buildings all over the world, numerous masterworks among them, this star of architecture has not left any remarkable imprint on the French capital, just the routinary Apple store on the Champs-Élysées, but he now makes up for such lack of ‘fosteritos’ through a grand retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. In the opinion of some, the idea of curating an autobiographical show in what is the flagship of modern French culture reeks of conceit, but there is no building in the City of Lights that is better suited to gather the complete works of the architect from Manchester than this high-tech Meccano where infrastructure becomes art, one of whose authors was a close friend and his very first professional partner.

Almost half a century after it opened and with just a year left before it closes for a revamp that will last until 2030, this feat of Rogers and Piano is the setting of a profuse montage of models, plans, and sketches that speak of Foster’s great capacity to work at any scale and address the problems of the discipline with his generation’s characteristic faith in technological progress. The show might border on the demiurgic and skirt the tougher questions that iconic architecture raises, but no one can deny that this is the grand pas d’action of a master who still gives the best of himself under the spotlights.