Bas Smets : Les Climats du Paysage - LUMA 2025

📍 LUMA Foundation, Arles

▪️  iDzia Installation: the sound, the lighting, the video

When the Landscape Becomes Climate

Presented at the LUMA Foundation, in the Magasin Électrique space, from July through November 2025, Bas Smets’ installation Les Climats du Paysage invites us to rethink the city as a living organism.

Bas Smets, creator of microclimates

Bas Smets, born in 1975 in Belgium, is a landscape architect whose diverse experiences have shaped the way he envisions urban spaces. In 2007, he founded his firm in Brussels and has since completed more than 50 projects internationally, including the landscape park at LUMA Arles’ Parc des Ateliers.

His work focuses on using natural elements to create spaces that can better adapt to their environment and, by extension, to the effects of climate change. Notably, he won the international competition for the redevelopment of the public space surrounding Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.

The City as a Living Laboratory

Les Climats du Paysage shows how the relationship between the city and nature can be reimagined and developed. As the LUMA Foundation summarizes regarding the architect’s approach:

“The city can be viewed as an assemblage of artificial climates” (LUMA Foundation, 2025).

The exhibition presents three projects that illustrate how landscape can help address the challenges of global warming: cooling the areas around Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, creating a park capable of withstanding rising sea levels in Antwerp, and designing the Parc des Ateliers at LUMA Arles as a self-sustaining space inspired by natural principles.

Finally, Les Climats du Paysage reveals the architect’s plans and documents, offering insight into his approach to landscape architecture, an approach that is now more necessary than ever.