Frank Gehry designs The Tower, Luma Arles’ Arts Campus.
Luma Arles arts center commissioned Pritzker Architecture prize-winning architect Frank Gehry to create a stainless steel-clad tower.




Luma Arles arts center commissioned Pritzker Architecture prize-winning architect Frank Gehry to create a stainless steel-clad tower. Gehry drew inspiration from two major historical and artistic references: Arles’ Roman architecture and Van Gogh's Starry Night that was painted close to the location.
The tower is 56-metre-high and comprises everything you expect in an arts campus: exhibition galleries, archives, one library, offices, seminar rooms and a café. Named The Tower, it takes place within a 27-acre vacant railyard which has been transformed into Luma Arles, with €150 million donation from Maja Hoffmann.
On the outside, the tower is covered with eleven thousand placed irregularly all over the façade. Swiss collector Maja Hoffmann created the tower back in 2013 as a landmark for Luma Arles, and today the building will indeed "establish Luma Arles as a significant site among the other landmarks of the city” as Gehdy confirms.
The exterior of the building -from the form to the placement of the cladding- was inspired by how Van Gogh portrayed the neighboring mountain range Les Alpilles, giving the building a painterly feel to it.
As for the Roman architecture, it is present in the cylindrical glass base from which the tower arises. Gehry explains that "The Romans used civic buildings to organize the densely situated buildings around it”.
- date publishedJuly 29, 2021
- categoryArchitecture
- original sourcedezeen↗