THE GREAT ARCH

1982. President François Mitterrand has launched an international competition to design the flagship project of his term in office: the Great Arch of La Défense, a building to match and complement the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe. To the surprise of everyone, the commission is won by an unknown 53-year-old from Copenhagen, Otto von Spreckelsen. An outsider with only a few modernist churches to his name, Spreckelsen’s stunning submission – taking the form of a perfect white cube – becomes the talk of the capital. Spreckelsen and his wife Liv arrive in Paris to commence, overseen by the project’s shrewd managing bureaucrat, but the purity of Spreckelsen’s envisioned design is soon tested not only by material and budgetary constraints but the vicissitudes of politics, forcing him to consider whether his desire for perfection is worth risking everything.