We wanted to evoke the local, from Van Gogh’s Starry Night to the soaring rock clusters you find in the region,”
said Gehry. The stainless steel-clad cultural building is the centrepiece of the Luma Arles arts campus in the town of
Arles. The 56-metre-high arts tower contains the exhibition galleries, archives, a library, offices, seminar rooms and a cafe for Luma Arles. Clad with 11,000 irregularly arranged stainless steel panels, the distinctive tower was designed to be a landmark structure for the arts centre. The design of the tower seeks to capture the movement of discrete
elements across a surface. This manner of breaking down the surface to visible modules became an important
theme in the surface development of the building as it reinforced the idea of a ‘painterly building.

IMPLEMENTATION
Assembly principle of stainless steel cassettes. A shell, formed from laser-cut steel sheets, folded and
welded together, gives the shell its geometry. Ensuring the building’s watertight and airtightness, it mainly uses the
stainless steel cladding cassettes of the facade. Hollow, of variable length and drilled on the back, the cassettes are equipped with lip seals and a viscoelastic to limit the risks of whistling and vibration of the metal. The cassettes
are clipped onto two preset metal supports (brackets), welded to the stiffeners of the shelves.

The project management team, led by Frank Gehry with the relay of the French branch of Studios Architecture, opted
for the on-site spraying of slag wool with hydraulic binder on the inner face of the stainless steel blocks that support
the facings.