“It was a semi-desert climate here. Officially—we measured it,” says Belgian landscape designer Bas Smets, standing by the large, limpid pool in his new 8.35-acre park at the LUMA Foundation in Arles, an ambitious arts and culture campus created by Swiss billionaire Maja Hoffmann on the site of a disused railroad repair yard (RECORD, June 2021 and February 2017). “I remember walking down here with Maja the first time she invited me: she told me she wanted to give the people of Arles a garden, and I thought, ‘A garden?! This place was scraped down to the bedrock—there’s no water, there’s no soil. How are we going to make a garden?’ ” The challenge was exacerbated by the local climate, with its scarce rain, its torrid summer sun, and its mistral, the infamous wind that blasts Provence from the north, chilling the landscape in winter and causing forest fires in summer. As a result, the LUMA site was decidedly harsh much of the year, which makes Bureau Bas Smets’s transformation all the more remarkable—a dry, dusty, mineral, rectilinear landscape of industrial dereliction has given way to a temperate, naturalistic haven of trees, grass, and crystal-clear water.