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Story of the Month
Surface Reflections

The eagerly awaited Luma Arles, housing Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Foundation initiative, opened its doors in Arles on June 26th, solidifying the city’s reputation as an important French cultural destination. 

 

The site is dominated by a twisting multifaceted behemoth of a tower designed by starchitect Frank Gehry, clad in over 11,000 metal panels, which has already caused controversy among the local people! Luma Arles is situated in an industrial railway yard, replete with several renovated 19th-century warehouses that previously belonged to SNCF and over 6000m2 of sprawling landscaped gardens by Bas Smets to explore and reflect in.

The scintillating surface of the tower was informed by Van Gogh’s painting, ‘Starry Night’ (1889), and the rocky Alpine faces that can be seen from the commune. The light strikes the faces and facets of the tower’s metal panels, in different ways throughout the day, reflecting in multiple directions at once, mimicking the impasto brushstrokes of the painting’s surface, imitating the cypress tree that dominates its composition, and illuminating the Arles skyline. 

 

The new multifaceted metallic surface created by the irregular placement of the plaques together explores the visual potential of the material’s reflective possibilities with natural light and awakens the three-dimensional possibilities of the tower under sunlight.

For our Recreation Carpet event in 2019 we created a sculptural POS shelf element using layers of our material Alucore. Alucore is a 100% aluminium honeycomb composite sheet material, usually exploited in architecture and the aeronautical industry as a clean metallic surface due to its flatness, lighter weight and tensile strength. We preferred working with the profile of the sheet, favouring the uneven broken honeycomb, which gave us a new material once layered and cut to form. 

 

The resulting sculptural element is a wonder under light, and this technique can be applied to any type of sculpture or 3D backdrop, with endless layering possibilities.

 

If you are interested to learn more about Alucore, look at the material page here, or  contact us for more information.