The Box

Event was appointed in 2015 to manage the complete design and fit-out of The Box, Plymouth. The project is an important fixture to Plymouth’s urban regeneration and forms the threshold to a new cultural quarter in the city. A multi-dimensional institution, The Box combines museum exhibits, social spaces, and engagement programmes aimed at connecting creativity and research activities from the community. In essence, The Box aims to be a catalyst for people to come together, to participate and to enjoy events and installations both within the building and in the surrounding streets.

The facility provides over 3,000sqm of interactive galleries and it unites five cultural collections that span a wide variety of material. These include social history, fine and decorative arts, biological specimens, naval memorabilia, the Plymouth Bomb Book, and the UK’s largest regional film and television archive.

For each gallery, Event devised a design conceived around a bold defining visual feature. This sought to embody the confidence and civic pride the city wanted to inspire in visitors. These signature displays include a life-size model of a woolly mammoth, rearing up towards the entrance of the Mammoth Gallery, the Port Model projection in the Port of Plymouth Gallery that immerses visitors in stories of the coastline, the ‘Big Screen’ in the Media Lab Gallery that plays selections from the film archive at huge scale across three walls, and the huge abstracted model of the Mayflower ship through which all visitors must pass as they enter the gallery that tells its story.

Content, 3D and graphic design teams worked closely to develop a hierarchy system for content that would work across galleries and remain consistent through printed and digital elements. With such varied themes and displays within the galleries the team were careful to ensure that visitors could enjoy a clear and comfortable narrative experience. The selected images are from the Mammoth and Mayflower galleries.