national maritime museum

studioplusthree were commissioned to design a new permanent exhibition for the Australian National Maritime Museum’s new 'Action Stations' experience, commemorating 100 years of the Royal Australian Navy. The exhibition is centred around a set of bespoke steel forms which incorporated a custom-design modular display system, developed to accommodate a constantly evolving set of physical and digital pieces. With an emphasis on the tactile and the physical, the exhibition seeks to invite the visitor behind the scenes of navy life. Centred around a pair of bespoke steel tables, the project aims to speak to both the history and future of the navy, and the role of the museum in bringing this story to life. This permanent exhibition is open to the public at the Australian National Maritime Museum.

This project was a study of detail and fabrication, developed in close collaboration with boat builders, metal fabricators and curators. Sitting between architecture, installation, industrial and furniture design, the project creates a custom content display system developed by studioplusthree with more than 2,600 individual components produced by a repetition engineer, designed to allow total flexibility in the arrangement of display content. The project relied on the deceptive simplicity of one gesture, the gentle curve of an industrial steel surface over 10 metres, to create the visual impact of the design. Drawing on the rich heritage of naval architecture and engineering, the project was fabricated using state-of-the-art techniques, such as tube laser cutting, in combination with traditional skills such as sheet metal rolling.