The spectacular new building of the Luma Foundation in Arles by architect Frank Gehry is both a museum and a studio building.
The spectacular new building of the Luma Arles Foundation is a work of art for art: Frank Gehry’s tower is both a museum and a studio building. It is the highlight of an art and cultural area that Luma founder Maja Hoffmann has realized over the course of 15 years.
Arles and art – the first thing that comes to mind is, of course, van Gogh, who sought to realize his dream of a studio in the south in an artistic partnership with Gauguin. However, his stay in Arles turned into a debacle for van Gogh. Not only did his collaboration with Gauguin end in a rift – in Arles he also began to suffer increasingly from delusions, until he finally had to go to the mental hospital in nearby Saint-Rémy.
It almost seems as if Maja Hoffmann had set out to heal van Gogh’s fate in Arles in retrospect. Hoffmann, who comes from the Basel industrialist dynasty of the same name, is one of the world’s most important art collectors and patrons. She has been a cultural initiator and patron of the arts in Arles for almost 20 years. In 2004, she founded the Luma Foundation there, which promotes and commissions contemporary art.
Three years later, Maja Hoffmann began a working process together with the architect Frank Gehry, the curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and a number of important contemporary artists. Together, they developed ideas for a new type of art and cultural center for the 21st century. Hoffmann chose the “Parc des Ateliers” as the location for this project. This is the site of the SNCF railroad depot on the edge of the historic old town of Arles, which has been abandoned since the 1980s. The historic workshop buildings have been renovated in recent years by architect Annabelle Selldorf. The building now houses exhibition spaces, artists’ studios and apartments as well as a restaurant.
The redesign of the “Parc des Ateliers” has now been crowned with the opening of the “Tower”, a 56-metre-high exhibition and studio building designed by Frank Gehry. The initial preparatory work for the project began back in 2009 and construction work began in 2013. The result is unmistakably the work of Gehry – who, however, combines the free forms so characteristic of his work with enormous geometric volumes. The architect designed a three-storey high plinth zone as a huge glass cylinder. A reference to the Roman amphitheater in Arles.
The actual tower rises out of the cylinder. Its side facing the city center presents itself as a shiny and wildly moving metal skin with rectangular window cores. On the side facing away from the city, on the other hand, the tower appears to be composed of two cubic bodies that stand next to each other at a slight angle. Inside the glass cylinder, the volumes of the various galleries appear to be freely distributed throughout the space. This form of organization is similar to that found in Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. There are also several studio spaces for artists here. The tower, on the other hand, mainly houses the foundation’s administrative offices. A public viewing terrace forms the upper end.
Numerous works of art, including those by Philippe Parreno and Olafur Eliasson, are an important part of the tower. They were created especially for this location. Incidentally, Atelier Luma is also part of the Luma Foundation’s work. This workshop has developed various sustainable construction and furnishing elements made from local materials for the project: the building includes textile wall cladding made from bioplastics, tiles dyed with algae and acoustic elements made from sunflowers.
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