Site and order
The "Maison du Méridien" in Villers-sur-Mer, on the Manche coastline, is a museographic equipment dedicated to the highlighting of the two emblematic city’s elements : the Vaches Noires cliffs, world-famous for their paleontologic interest, and the Greenwich meridian, entering here the continental Europe. It takes place on a beautiful protected marsh, in renaturalisation thanks to the Littoral Conservatory.
Architectural project
The building stretches along a line symbolizing the Meridian and creating a link between land ans see. The central componant of the project, structuring the whole visiting experience, is a « cliff-wall » going right through the building, along the marsh landscape, and continuing outdoor. This great architectural and scenographic element appears as the exhibition’s guideline, making the discovering of the building active in every spaces, and echoes Villers natural cliffs. Central paleontological themes are tackled there as in a big open book. At the lower level of the wall, showcases at children’s hand present the collections ; a second level, higher, gathers texts, sketches, multimedia for an interactive interpretation ; to the top, a last information level suggests analogies between the cliff’s evocation, the time markers and the collections. Sometimes the « cliff-wall » gapes to give access to immersive spaces.
