The museum of the 'big' questions
75 years after the last exhibition, we were privileged to contribute to the reopening of Amsterdam's first museum building: the ARTIS Groote Museum. The website moves visitors to come as individuals and leave as part of a greater whole.
Organization
The ARTIS Grand Museum is where you experience that everything is connected because everything that lives shares the same home: our world.
Challenge
The goal was to inspire and motivate different target groups to come to the museum with this message: here you experience the connection with yourself, your body and all other life on earth.
Solution
We developed a website that invites visitors to explore, a preview of a visit to the iconic building where you "come as an individual and leave as part of a greater whole."
A cultural-historical icon
After being closed for 75 years, the museum building has been completely restored and renovated. It consists of two halls. The West Hall is where the exhibits can be seen and is divided into twelve zones, each dedicated to a body part such as your heart or vocal cords. The East Hall is a meeting place where activities take place for everyone. To create cohesion, we connected the themes of the exhibition to the activities on the program.
Take your body with you
A visit to the ARTIS Grand Museum is like a journey of discovery. The parts of your body are the starting point for an associative exploration of yourself and your connection to the world around you. We made that element of exploration part of the navigation. Initially, a significant proportion of website visitors will mainly want to know what the museum has to offer. For that you go to 'Discover'. If you want to experience it in person, go to 'plan your visit'.
Image that lives
The ARTIS-Great Museum wants you to experience that as a human being you are part of living nature. For that reason, we developed a minimalist design in which living, moving images play the leading role. A content-first approach to do maximum justice to building and content.
A digital ecosystem
A user-friendly, scalable and sustainable content management system ensures that we will eventually be able to house the ARTIS and ARTIS-Micropia websites in it as well. Not only does this make management and maintenance easier and cheaper, the 'headless' Drupal CMS with React frontend also makes it easy to publish content on various channels, such as the narrowcasting of program and prices on a screen at the entrance.
A platform for dialogue
Despite zoos often being considered controversial, Artis demonstrates a deep awareness of its role and behaves accordingly. By launching the Groote Museum, it is actively taking a leadership position in the ongoing social dialogue about our relationship with the natural world.