“Maja Hoffmann founded the LUMA Foundation in 2004 and built LUMA Arles around it — a Frank Gehry-designed campus in the south of France that’s turned Arles into one of contemporary art’s more unlikely pilgrimage sites.”
Visit LUMA Foundation →Why Maja Hoffmann is in the Design 100
Maja Hoffmann founded the LUMA Foundation in Zurich in 2004, then spent the best part of a decade giving it a permanent home: LUMA Arles, a former industrial site in the south of France that she and Frank Gehry reshaped into an interdisciplinary campus for art, research and production. Gehry’s twisting, steel-clad tower, the project’s signature building, opened to the public in 2021, the visible culmination of a plan first set in motion when the wider campus launched in 2013.
What sets Hoffmann apart is patience rather than spectacle. LUMA Arles exists to fund and support artists’ work over years, not to stage a single opening, and its programme spans photography, ecology, documentary film and archives alongside exhibitions. In building it, Hoffmann has turned Arles — a Roman-walled town best known for its light and its Van Gogh associations — into a genuine fixture on the contemporary art calendar, and established herself as one of the field’s more consequential patrons.
This profile carries Martyn White’s Design 100 seal — one of 100 names selected for the 2026 index of the people and studios shaping our coverage of architecture, interiors, art and design. Honourees are welcome to display the seal on their own site; get in touch for the embed code.
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