Norman Foster, Hermitage Plaza, París, 2009

With François Hollande’s election as president of the Republic, and the return to power of the socialist Left sixteen years after François Mitterrand’s defeat, France is living a moment of political change. In a country that likes to name its artistic styles after royal reigns (‘Louis XV’, ‘Louis XVI’) or political regimes (‘Convention’, ‘Directory’), and that still remembers how the year 1981 marked the passage from a clearly postmodern period (that of Giscard d’Estaing, who was attached to heritage and defended architecture à la francaise) to the more serene modernity of Mitterrand and his cultural grand projets, we can rightfully expect this new political shift to bring about a parallel cultural one...