Oceanographic Museum
Date :
2000
Place :Principality of Monaco
Client :Oceanographic Museum of Monaco
Project :Jean Marc Schivo & Lucilla Revelli
Coordination :François Doumenge
The jellyfish
In 1889 Prince Albert Ier, founder of the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, chose the jellyfish as the symbol of his museum and the jellyfish guided and inspired the whole project of expansion. Studying its different planktonic and pelagic forms several aspects of its growth emerged, giving the idea for a structure based on its transparency and polimorfism.
A place for research and temple of the sea, as the author of the present museum defined it, the Medusa is a new dream museum for the third millenium.
«I want to show you the sea in the light given to it by scientific study, with characters whose greatness, philosophy and poetry give the soul elevated emotions. For this body of water carries within itself life with its struggles and transformations; not life as we practice it, we children of the atmosphere, of heat and light, but another which imposes on the beings it animates foreign physical and physiological conditions, so to speak extraterrestrial.”
Albert I
The centenary of the construction of the Oceanographic Museum represented the opportunity, strongly desired by Prince Rainier III and the director of the museum, Prof. Dumange, to relaunch the idea of a new expansion at sea that realizes the dream of Prince Albert Ier and Cousteau is to bring man underwater to directly contact the reality of the oceans.
The new project involves the construction of a new museum entrance with the creation of new internal aquariums.
A walkway will connect the current structure with the new exhibition space dedicated to the Mediterranean and the protection of the oceans.
Three elevators will allow the visitor to reach the submerged area and experience emotions unimaginable until now.
“We will not have a spare ocean!»
Cristian Buchet
«Taking a new look at the sea (through the realization of new scientific spaces capable of collecting especially the new generations) is one of the necessities to better understand and take advantage of its immense resources in order to save humans: this is the challenge to preserve maritime space and its biodiversity.»