In 1984, France’s national railway, the SNCF, shut down a rail yard with a handful of handsome 19th-century industrial sheds in the sun-washed southern city of Arles. The so-called Parcs des Ateliers, where broken trains had been repaired since the 1850s, was a major provider of employment in the town, which now numbers 54,000 inhabitants. But after the yards closed, the 16-acre sunken site remained unoccupied and unloved, a dustbowl next to the Avenue Victor Hugo, one of the city’s main roads. Only the historic Roman amphitheaters and favorite spots of Van Gogh (who produced 30 paintings here between 1888 and 1889) were able to shore up the town’s fortunes with tourism.
But like plenty of other postindustrial sites–the power station in London that’s now the Tate Modern (RECORD, July 2016; June 2000), or the distillery in Milan that’s returned as the Prada Foundation (RECORD, July 2015)–culture has flowed like water into the spaces that industry left behind. In this case, a radical new arts campus is rising from the SNCF’s ashes, in the private hands of Maja Hoffmann, a Swiss pharmaceutical heiress, philanthropist, and collector of contemporary art, who arrived in Arles when she was just a few weeks old and considers it her hometown. Her foundation, Luma, begun in 2004 with the mission of spurring artistic activity rather than just exhibiting its results, will spend a sum estimated to be north of $100 million on the project. The centerpiece of the new Parc des Ateliers site is Frank Gehry’s dazzling (literally, with its stainless-steel cladding) 185-foot-high tower for an art and research center, which will open in 2018. Its architect says the clustered blocks are inspired by the rock formations that occur naturally in the region.
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