This is the second part of our coverage of LUMA Arles which is much more than just a museum; it’s an ambitious, interdisciplinary creative campus that has fundamentally revitalized a vast area of the historic city. Part 1 is here in case you missed it.
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The LUMA campus is situated on the southeast side of the city, built on the Parc des Ateliers, a sprawling 27-acre former industrial railway wasteland.
The industrial site was built in 1844-1856, for the construction and repair of steam locomotives, owned by the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée (PLM) company, the predecessor of SNCF (France’s national train operator).
There is an artificial pond on site, which measures 2,500 square meters.
While it looks natural to us, it is not merely decorative. The pond creates a local microclimate that helps mitigate the arid conditions of Provence in the summer.
The water for the pond is drawn from the nearby 16th-century Craponne canal. It serves as a reservoir for irrigating the park’s vegetation, which includes over 500 newly planted native trees and 80,000 other plants.
Bas Smets, the Belgian landscape architect sculpted a new topology by layering on top of the existing concrete slab with fertile soil that is used to plant native vegetations. The ground has mounds and dips shaped as though by natural forces.
Amidst the seemingly natural landscape is the work – Seven Sliding Doors Corridor (Outdoor Version) by Carsten Höller. It consists of a passage that spans the pond.
Inside that space are doors positioned at evenly-spaced intervals and are connected to motion sensors that cause them to slide open or close depending on the proximity of a person.
The electronic sliding doors are mirrored on both sides, creating facing reflections that make the passage feel like an endless corridor as you walk through.
Over the pond, an installation projects mist from time to time creating a fog sculpture that intermittently skims the water, obscuring the Tower and envelops the visitors. Fujiko Nakaya who is 91 created this.
Membrane by Philippe Parreno, as a part of a five-artist exhibition (Cloud Chronicles | Dance with Daemons), explores the interconnections between art and reality and the ways in which artists’ works relate to each other. It is an example of how technology has become an integral part of contemporary art today.
The sculpture involves several discs that slides slowly up and down a 10+ meter pole and they are connected by cables to the ground and equipped with lights. Scattered loudspeakers produce noises around the sculpture.
The largest standing structure in Parc des Ateliers is a 5,000-square-meter building (below). It was built between 1888 and 1894, and housed the factory in which steam locomotives were built and repaired.
The building was restored in 2007 by Moatti–Rivière Architects, and renamed as La Grande Halle.
The transformation of the building included the replacement of a façade with a glass wall covered with a cladding of steel sheets applied on a triangular grid.
Near the entrance to the Parc des Ateliers, two large-scale mosaics are installed, one inside and one outside of the Café du Parc.
The piece, created by Kerstin Brätsch, is designed to visually unify the interior space with the landscaped park outside.
The colorful mosaics are based on figures from the artist’s paintings, and are meant to be viewed from above when you are descending from an external staircase.
Unfortunately, as you can see in these photos, we arrived after closing time for the exhibition spaces and the Café. We plan to make a return visit the next time we’re in Provence. Part 1 is here in case you missed it.
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