The Luma Foundation opens its Frank Gehry tower
The stainless steel tower that Frank Gehry designed for the Luma Foundation (image: Iwan Baan).
Clad in 11,000 stainless steel panels arranged like a faceted carapace, a new Frank Gehry tower has been opened in Arles, France.
The tower is part of Luma Arles, a multidisciplinary cultural complex spread over 27 acres at the Parc des Atéliers, the site of former railway workshops in Arles.
Gehry’s tower contains exhibition galleries, archives, a library and offices. The steel facade is intended to echo Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, a former resident of Arles, while it sits atop a steel and glass rotunda that is intended to reference Arles’ Roman amphitheatre.
“I visited here when I was living in Paris and studying Roman architecture and I was very moved by it,” said Gehry at a press conference to announce the building’s opening. “This is my first Roman building.”
“I love the light in Arles and the wind, the mistral that is here,” he said. “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 complex of which the tower forms a part is the idea of Maja Hoffmann, who founded the arts organisation Luma Foundation in 2004. Hoffmann signed an agreement with Arles to develop the site in 2008, which was originally a major employer in the city. Arles’s unemployment rate now stands a 12 per cent as compared to France’s national average of 9 per cent.
Alongside Gehry’s work, the site also houses a park made by landscape designer Bas Smets, while architect Annabelle Selldorf has renovated the former railway buildings into spaces for art, design and performance.
At the tower’s opening, Hoffmann said: “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.”
Luma Arles is of particular interest to the design world given its inclusion of Atelier Luma, a body led by Jan Boelen in which designers have launched a number of environmental investigations including developing new materials from locally available resources such as salt, mussel shells and sunflower straw.
Story source: The Financial Times and The Guardian