LaM travel tips and stories. Vacations ideas, cruises, spa and resorts

LaM or Lille Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outside Art is a spectacular art museum located in Villeneuve d’Ascq, France. With more than 4,500 artworks on a 4,000-square-metre (43,000 sq ft) exhibition area, the LaM is the only museum in Europe to present simultaneously the main components of the 20th and 21th centuries art : modern art, contemporary art and outsider art.

The museum holds some masterpieces of Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Joan Miro, Georges Braque, Fernand Leger, Alexander Calder and the biggest outsider art collection in France. LaM possesses also a library and a rich park of sculptures. The whole collection of the museum is an overview of drawings, painting, sculpture, photography,prints, illustrated books and artist’s books and electronic media.

This year the LaM museum boasts with brand new extensions, adding a travelling progression to the space. The architecture of the extension wraps around the north and east sides of the existing arrangement in a fan-splay of long, fluid and organic volumes. On one side, the fan ribs stretch in close folds to shelter a cafe-restaurant that opens to the central patio; on the other, the ribs are more widely spaced to form the five galleries for the Art brut collection.

On the cafe-restaurant side, the close folds of the extension enable us to redefine the patio, to loosen up links from the entrance hall towards the restructured spaces: cafe-restaurant, bookshop and auditorium. The original structure was built by Roland Simounet in 1983 in a green setting.