« The magnificent Palais d’Antin, the west wing of the Grand Palais, home to thePalais de la découverte, had never benefited from a complete renovation since the museum’s creation in 1937. The time had come to revamp the science museum, which has triggered the wonderment and curiosity of its more than 35 million visitorsover the years. The ravages of time, the dilapidated facilities and below-standardaccessibility made this renovation project all the more urgent.
The rehabilitation of the whole Grand Palais complex has given the Palais de la Découverte the opportunity to rethink its scientific and cultural content, with a view to renewing the experience proposed to visitors while keeping the soul and original spirit of the place alive. Remaining true to the spirit of the Palais de la Découverte’s founder, Nobel Laureate Jean Perrin, means showing science in the making through live staff-mediated demonstrations.
By 2025, the “Palais de la Découverte 2025” will be a standard-setting venue, a place where the issues of science today are addressed and discussed, driven by a new impetus yet retaining its hallmark presentations of experiments by staff educators. This is the gist of the scientific and cultural project defined for and by the Palais de la Découverte in a collaborative process in which staff members and partners from the fields of science, art and museology participated.
While maintaining the principle of presenting basic sciences by discipline and fostering a discovery of research, new scientific fields, such as computer science, and transdisciplinary approaches will be present at the Palais de la Découverte 2025 with an eye to further enhancing visitor experience."
Our great interdisciplinary team
We are very proud and honoured that Universcience has selected our team, following a call for tenders, for the architectural and scenographic design of the future Palais de la découverte.
Our team is experienced and has already worked together on a number of projects, and is interdisciplinary. The objective is to work in a truly collective intelligence in order to meet the ambitions of this new scientific and cultural offer, whether with the teams of Universcience or those of all the other players in the renovation of the Grand Palais.
Innovation and dialogue with the historic building
Our project is set in the architectural composition of the Palais d’Antin, the west wing of the Grand Palais which has housed the Palais de la découverte since 1937, made magnificent by the restoration project currently underway.
In dialogue and respect with the historical monument, our principle of scenographic landscape is deliberately deployed in a delicate and harmonious way in relation to the space and volumes. In this historic architecture, spaces such as laboratories, open or semi-open spaces for disciplinary presentations for demonstrations with researchers or mediators, large manipulators, units of curiosity, a tropical greenhouse to talk about living systems and open-air experiments will be set up.
This project also responds to the strong environmental ambitions of Universcience, through eco-design and re-use.
Scenography and micro-architecture
A perfect example of the architectural and scenographic challenge for our team: the living laboratory and its greenhouse.
The challenge: to reconstruct a Guianese ecosystem in real conditions (at 28°C and 70% humidity) in a fine arts building created in 1900! This greenhouse is a micro-architected object that follows the scenographic concept inspired by the building itself: a circle or an ellipse in the centre of a rectilinear structure, in a play of volumes.
It is like an object to be seen - placed on a mediation table - as much as a space to be experienced - in which one enters in immersion, in the jungle.
Access is via an airlock and the visitor then moves along a central circulation lined with tropical plants, an aquarium and terrariums.
Precious and highly technical, it is an unexpected space that fills with wonder, a refuge for the imagination.
