“A question that pops up regularly is, ‘Why a tower?’,” preemptively declared billionaire Swiss pharmaceutical heiress Maja Hoffmann at the inauguration of the latest addition to her $175 million LUMA Foundation for the arts in the ancient-Roman town of Arles, France. “I just wanted to say it came out of me and not out of the architect alone.” The architect is Frank Gehry, whom Hoffmann first approached in 2008, just after she’d signed a deal with the Ville d’Arles to convert a 16-acre railroad repair yard into an ambitious new cultural campus.
Located on the outskirts of town, the Parc des Ateliers, as the former industrial site is known, was home to an impressive collection of 19th- and early-20th-century atelier buildings, which have since been partially demolished to create space for a new public park (brilliantly realized by Bas Smets), with the remaining structures being converted for artistic use—the Grande Halle by Moatti Rivière in 2007 and the rest, rather more sensitively, by Selldorf Architects in the years since (Record, February 2017). But, evidently feeling her foundation (which combines the first two letters of her children’s names, Lucas and Marina) needed a contemporary architectural statement, the billionairess ordered up a bit of that old Bilbao magic to help put LUMA Arles on the global cultural map.
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