Creating a Guiding Thread at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs

Signage, Architecture & Heritage, Arts & Culture
Designer : Laurent Vié
Photographer : Luc Boegly, Arthur Lockhart
Musée des Arts décoratifs
Paris, France, 2007

The building of the Musée des arts décoratifs is adjacent to the Louvre building in Paris. The entrance on Rue de Rivoli is not very visible, and the museum suffered from this lack of readability. It is with these specifications that the Musée des arts décoratifs contacted us in 2007. We proposed to highlight the entrance with a red lacquered aluminum sheet. Along with designer Laurent Vié, we designed the kakemonos along the entrance to create a communication support on the axis of the rue de Rivoli.

Inside, our signage principle had to be integrated with several different architects and a complex historical journey from the Middle Ages to the present day. For Directional signage, we used the lentoid, a material that expresses movement, and on the ground inserts of small black and grey stones. Didactic signage goes from the object cartel to the staging cartel, from a reading at ground level to a 180° reading. For this purpose, we designed a transparent adjustable triangular support that can accommodate papers ranging from A3 to A7 size.

In 2011, we were again contacted by the museum, which was celebrating its fifth anniversary. For the occasion, and after having noticed the curiosity of the visitors and their desire to know more, the museum management decided to reintroduce didactic texts in the rooms. We reinterpreted a series of wallpapers or motifs from the museum’s collections. These strips took place in the rooms and became text carriers. Twelve wallpaper motifs were created, punctuating the circulation of visitors and offering a scenic escape in parallel to the words.