Arles, France

“I visited here when I was living in Paris and studying Roman architecture and I was very moved by it,” states Frank Gehry.

“This is my first Roman building.”

Frank Gehry and Annabelle Selldorf of Selldorf Architects along with Belgium landscape architect Bas Smets and Studios Architecture, C + D have revealed a tower for the Luma Arles arts centre in southern France ahead of its public opening.

Developed by the LUMA Foundation, Luma Arles is a new contemporary art center that brings together artists, researchers, and creators from every field to collaborate on multi-disciplinary works and exhibitions.

Located south of Arles’ historic city center, the project repurposes the industrial ruins of a 16-acre rail depot and introduces a new public park designed by Bas Smets.

Selldorf Architects contributed to the overall master plan, designing the renovation and conversion of five original structures into two new exhibition facilities, a hotel, a visitor center and café, as well as a dance studio and artists’ residence.

At the heart of the project is Frank Gehry’s spectacular 15,000 square-meter tower, a twisting geometric structure finished with 11,000 stainless steel panels.

Rising from the skyline of Arles, the tower appears like a futuristic structure from a Marvel movie with the steel panels gleaming in the Provençal sun.

The tower, with its glittering facade meant to evoke Van Gogh’s painting “Starry Night,” will be the literal high point of a new “creative campus” called Luma Arles, a multidisciplinary art and culture complex sprawling over 27 acres at the Parc des Atéliers, the site of former railway workshops.

At the base of the tower is a vast steel and glass rotunda, also by Gehry, nicknamed the Drum, a structure he said was inspired by the city’s noted Roman amphitheater.

The stainless steel-clad cultural building is the centerpiece of the Luma Arles Arts Centre in the city of Arles.

It houses exhibition galleries, project spaces and the LUMA’s research and archive facilities, alongside workshop and seminar rooms.

The campus is also home to seven former railway factories, four of which have been renovated by Selldorf Architects as exhibition and performance spaces.

“We wanted to evoke the local, from Van Gogh’s Starry Night to the soaring rock clusters you find in the region,” said Gehry.

The 56-metre-high arts tower contains the exhibition galleries, archives, a library, offices, seminar rooms and a cafe for Luma Arles.

“I love the light in Arles and the wind, the mistral that is here,” states Gehry.

“I liked the idea of capturing and reflecting the light in this region and this city. It is not a cold building … the metal has a softness about it, even inside. It plays with the light in the extraordinary way I hoped for. It is part of the city and I wanted it to be soft and welcoming.”

The form of the building and the arrangement of the stainless-steel cladding was informed by the nearby Les Alpilles mountain range northeast of Arles and how they were depicted by Dutch post-impressionist painter Van Gogh.

“The skyline of Arles is populated with towers built from the ancient times to the Middle Ages up to the present,” said Gehry.

“The design of the tower seeks to capture the movement of discrete elements across a surface.”

“This manner of breaking down the surface to visible modules became an important theme in the surface development of the building as it reinforced the idea of a ‘painterly building’.”

“The design of the tower seeks to capture the movement of discrete elements across a surface,” he continued.

“This manner of breaking down the surface to visible modules became an important theme in the surface development of the building as it reinforced the idea of a ‘painterly building’.”

The Tower stands within the 27-acre former railyard that was left vacant in 1986, which has been turned into Luma Arles, funded by a €150 million donation from Maja Hoffmann.

The Tower’s opening exhibition includes works by Diane Arbus, Annie Leibovitz, Olafur Eliasson and others, and will have a permanent room dedicated to a rotating display of the collection of Hoffmann, whose Luma Foundation commissioned the building.

The Swiss film producer and philanthropist’s grandmother, Maja Sacher, was a well-known collector of Picasso works, and her father, Lukas Hoffmann, was a co-founder of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Hoffmann, who was born in Switzerland but grew up in the south of France, said the “creative campus” of Luma Arles, which will be free to enter, was the foundation’s gift to the city.

“I hope the people of Arles will get to know this tower. It represents a notion of hope, an archipelago where everything is possible. It is a place where the past, present and future come to mix,” states Hoffmann.

“It has been a long and interesting, sometimes difficult but great journey to get here, but I am very proud of what Maja and I have created together,” Gehry states.

“I tried to make a building that was welcoming and inviting. The Drum is not architecturally complicated. At street level it’s meant to invite you in. It’s not postmodern. It’s trying to be something of its time, and it has feeling, I hope.”

“The new building will help establish Luma Arles as a significant site among the other landmarks of the city,” states Gehry.

Patrick de Carolis, the mayor of Arles, said Gehry had produced “something extraordinary” for the town.

“It’s also an extraordinary challenge that Arles now had to rise to in terms of having the infrastructure, including hotels and transport, to welcome the visitors it will attract,” De Carolis said.

“Now we have to be able to match that level of ambition.”

Along with the Gehry-designed centerpiece, a series of industrial buildings on the site have been renovated by New York-based Selldorf Architects.

These buildings, which once formed a railway manufacturing factory, have been converted into exhibition spaces, performing Arts residencies, a hotel and a restaurant.

“With every space in the complex we seek to create a balance allowing the 19th-century industrial vocabulary to coexist simply with contemporary purpose, all the while creating well-proportioned spaces with controllable natural light and clear circulation,” said Annabelle Selldorf, principal of Selldorf Architects.

Project: Luma Arles Arts Centre
Architects: Gehry Partners, LLP.
Renovation Architects: Selldorf Architects
Executive Architecture Team: Studios Architecture, C + D
Landscape Architects: Bas Smets, Bureau Bas Smets
Project Management: MYAMO
Client: LUMA Foundation
Photographers: Adrian Deweerdt, Hervé Hôte and Victor Picon