"The renovated Musée national de la Marine houses exhibition design that looks to “bring the sea to Paris” by balancing contemporary design, innovation and heritage through dramatic interventions," writes Emily Gosling of Design Week.

"Casson Mann took an innovative approach that deviates from traditional museum wall hangs and display cases in discrete rooms. Instead, the scenography makes use of open space to create drama and a sense of rhythm utilising different heights and scales. It mixes large sculptural interventions including shipping containers, immersive audiovisual installations, interactive media and more traditional “national treasures” such as busts, paintings and ship models."

"An integral part of the project was to open up the museum to new audiences. To do that, Casson Mann’s approach was to reframe maritime heritage in view of the profound power of the sea itself, taking in themes around climate crisis and emotion-led stories of human endeavour, through displays covering everything from commerce, sport, leisure and travel to war, peace, fear, loss and survival."

Roger Mann tells Design Week: "There’s still that appeal for ship fanatics but now there’s a much broader story threaded through everything that they weren’t telling before, making it more relevant to new audiences."

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“The space is long, curved and tall, and the architecture used some interesting curved glass floating mezzanines, so a lot of it was about creating a sense of rhythm through dividing the high spaces into three galleries,” says Roger. "By and large we kept the walls completely free and kept them ambiguous in the space – that leads to a good relationship between the architecture and the scenography. We instead hung paintings on free-standing elements in front of the wall and used large pieces like the wave, which sit as sculptural landmarks, to create separation between spaces to help create changes in atmosphere.”

Design Week describes: "One such landmark is a huge ship’s hull housing an immersive film about the sea, which visitors enter to start their museum journey. One of the most striking sculptural interventions is a vast 20m-long and 8m-high animated wave installation that recreates the sensation of being immersed in the ocean, looking to give visitors a “suspenseful feeling of the ‘calm before the storm’” to introduce the Shipwrecks and Storms gallery. It uses a soundscape created in collaboration with French audiovisual production house Clap 35 that “captures the deep rumble of the sea and complements the visual drama of the projection,” according to Casson Mann."

"Scent is also incorporated throughout to create a further sense of immersion in the world of the sea, used in spaces such as the material library and in exhibits focusing on petrol and sailors’ superstitions."

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