Through a remarkable photographic archive of precious albums and over a thousand images, the book goes back in time from the construction of the Samaritaine department store in Paris in 1870, an emblem of modernity with its blend of Art Deco and Art Nouveau, to its reopening in 2021. Built by architects Frantz Jourdain and Henri Sauvage on the banks of the Seine, the building went through a series of transformations that the images document.