Tour aux figures, Monumental sculpture in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France.
The Tour aux Figures is a 24-metre-high, 12-metre-wide sculpture on a small hill in the Île Saint-Germain park. A reinforced concrete and metal frame carries 90 epoxy-resin panels painted in white, blue, red and black, with forms outlined in black. Inside, a sprayed-plaster labyrinth painted black and white climbs 117 metres to a room at the top.
Jean Dubuffet made a one-metre model in July 1967, then refined the project with architect Antoine Butor, whose third interior scheme, the Gastrovolve, was the one built. In 1983 Jack Lang proposed an edifice for Paris; sites at Place d'Italie, La Villette and Saint-Cloud were rejected. Dubuffet accepted the Île Saint-Germain hill in January 1985 and died that May; construction ran from 1986 to 1988, with Richard Dhoedt's team making the 90 panels.
The tower belongs to Dubuffet's L'Hourloupe cycle, an imaginary world he began in 1962; its winding black-outlined forms are meant to shift between real and imagined as the eye follows them. Inside, the 117-metre climb through the Gastrovolve lets visitors walk within the artwork rather than stand before it.
The tower stands on a small hill in the eastern part of the Île Saint-Germain departmental park, on the island of the same name in the Seine downstream of Paris. The interior, a 117-metre ascending labyrinth of sprayed plaster painted black and white, leads to a room at the top. Access is on foot within the park grounds.
The interior is a 117-metre ascending labyrinth of sprayed plaster painted black and white, which Dubuffet named the Gastrovolve. It opens onto small landings and ends in a room at the top, so visitors walk inside the artwork rather than around it.
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