The Tower, a landmark structure designed by architect Frank Gehry, located in the heart of the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, France, has finally opened.
Built between 2014 and 2021, the 56 meters tall Tower is a 15,000-square-meter building, incorporating a series of structures and spaces, including exhibition halls, archive spaces, a library, work and research rooms, event venues, a café-restaurant and a panoramic terrace on the 9th floor.
From the outside it looks particularly fascinating: its façade incorporates indeed 11,000 stainless steel bricks, a material typical of Gehry's work. Each brick is unique and with a special number and location on the building. Deformed with a specific mechanical process the bricks contribute to give the illusion the Tower is twisted on itself. The twisted façade effect calls to mind structures such as the Spiral Apartment House by Zvi Hecker (located on a hillside in Ramat Gan, Israel).
Besides, The Tower also incorporates 53 glass boxes that visitors can use as windows extending beyond the façade to offer different views of the site and its surroundings.
Thanks to its reflective surface, a nod to the pictorial practice of Vincent van Gogh and to his passion for Provençal skies, The Tower perfectly captures the variations in the sky, replicating them and therefore giving the illusion of being in constant transformation.
While it looks like one tower it is actually made of four different interconnected towers, attached to a concrete spine that houses the elevators and stairs. The structure is also inspired by minerals.
Gehry was indeed inspired by the rock clusters of the region for the shape and the internal structure of the building, and in particular by the landscapes of the Alpilles (even though the irregular and reflective shade actually seems to point to rainbow bismuth crystals, so to a different configuration) and the architect also used the geological vocabulary to characterise certain parts of the building, such as the glazed "faults" (indicating in geology planar fractures or discontinuities in a volume of rock caused by a significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements) that run along the façade and connect the towers together.
The structure at the foot of the building, the Drum, is a glass rotunda inspired by the Arles Amphitheater, and it is inspired instead by Roman structures and urbanism.
The Tower is also sustainable as the energy supply for this structure and for other buildings on the site will be provided by the centralized cogeneration system using waste vegetable oil installed in Les Forges.
The Tower, opening with an exhibition including works by Diane Arbus, Annie Leibovitz, Olafur Eliasson and others, is part of the Parc des Ateliers, an area covering 27 hectares originally built in the 19th century as an industrial site for the repair and construction of steam locomotives.
At its height it was also the city's largest employer with more than 1,800 workers on site. With the arrival of electric locomotives, the Parc was gradually dismissed until it closed in 1984, becoming an industrial wasteland. From 2000 onwards, the site underwent a gradual renaissance until it was relaunched as a cultural hub with the LUMA Arles project, an arts centre launched in 2013 by Swiss collector Maja Hoffmann.
Among the creative spaces based at the Parc there is also the Atelier LUMA, a design and research laboratory, a production workshop, and a network of multidisciplinary experts comprising 20 people, among them designers, artists, biologists, engineers and farmers. The atelier has been focusing on different projects including the reuse of agricultural wastes and valorization of traditional crafts.
Several innovative and sustainable materials developed by Atelier LUMA were also employed in the Tower, among them salt walls and salt and concrete ceilings, developed in collaboration with the salt workers of the Salins du Midi, the result of an exploration of the properties of salt in the context of a public building in the Camargue, and the potential benefits of new uses of salt on the local economy.
Besides, the tile-shaped wall coverings inside The Tower were made from algae biopolymers, which have been in development at Atelier LUMA since 2016.
Upholstery fabrics for The Tower were also developed through Atelier LUMA's research on Arles merino wool, invasive species, and pigments from local dye plants and algae. Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija created acoustic panels in sunflower pith and hung a monumental tapestry in The Tower café. Last but not least, the furniture in The Tower is the result of a collaboration between Atelier LUMA, local farmers, and publisher Artek, who applied research conducted since 2017 on rice straw and invasive species to the manufacture of objects.
Image Credits for this post
1. The Tower, LUMa, Arles, France
2. Drawing of The Tower by Frank Gehry
3. The Tower in construction, September 2016, by Hervé Hôte
4, 5 and 6. The Tower, LUMA, Arles, France by Adrian Deweerdt
7. The Tower, LUMA, Arles, France, by Marc Domage
8. The Tower, LUMA, Arles, France, by Rémi Benali
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