LUMA Arles – Frank Gehry
Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry has revealed a tower for the Luma Arles arts centre in southern France. Named The Tower, the stainless steel-clad cultural building is the centrepiece of the Luma Arles arts campus in the town of Arles. According to Gehry, the design references Arles’ Roman architecture, nearby mountains and Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night painting, which was painted nearby.
The 56-metre-high arts tower contains the exhibition galleries, archives, a library, offices, seminar rooms and a cafe for Luma Arles. Clad with 11,000 irregularly arranged stainless steel panels, the distinctive tower was designed to be a landmark structure for the arts centre, which was established in 2013 by Swiss collector Maja Hoffmann.
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.
