The museum will search to inform the story of British shoe producer and retailer Clarks, delving into its origins and the evolution of its advertising and manufacturing processes.
Nissen Richards Studio has been appointed to steer the design and interpretation of the brand new Clarks Museum, which is because of open across the firm’s two hundredth anniversary in 2025.
The challenge entails designing the content material, customer expertise and everlasting exhibition for the museum, which can showcase the gathering of historic artefacts and archives related to the British shoe producer and retailer. After a aggressive tender, the studio was appointed in April by Alfred Gillett Belief, a charitable organisation set as much as safeguard and protect the gathering and archives of the Clark household and C & J Clark Ltd.
The museum shall be positioned in Road, a village close to Glastonbury the place Clarks first started and the place the Belief can be based mostly.
The tender course of concerned proposing an strategy to the challenge in addition to presenting the studio’s earlier work, based on Nissen Richards director Pippa Nissen. She says that the challenge stood out to the staff due to the “steadiness of historic and new” and the “social historical past” hooked up to the Clarks, including that it “chimes with what [the team] get pleasure from doing”.
Since successful the challenge, Nissen Richards has began to work on the tales behind the interpretation design. Nissen says the studio intends to “solid the online vast” and discover a steadiness of tales referring to Road’s area people and the broader Clarks group.
“The nostalgia round Clarks is a very shared feeling. Everybody within the studio has obtained a Clarks story, and most of the people’s first college sneakers are typically Clarks,” she says. The museum may also search to spotlight that, though folks have a tendency to consider Clarks as “a really British factor”, it’s a world retailer, Nissen provides.
The studio is eager for there to be a mixture of “greater, immersive moments” and “extra intimate settings”, says Nissen. She provides that there’ll doubtless be some “mass shows of sneakers” to exhibit how types have modified over the time that Clarks has been manufacturing.
The museum shall be made up of three important gallery areas every exploring a distinct theme. One will concentrate on Road and its relevance to Clarks’ origin story, celebrating “the social historical past of the place and the corporate”. One other will have a look at the design and making of the sneakers that includes retired equipment to assist “the storytelling of the manufacturing of basic sneakers” says Nissen Richards head of interpretation and engagement Elin Simonsson. The ultimate area will centre round promoting and shopping for and the way Clarks has interacted with customers, displaying examples of posters and advertising utilized by Clarks , looking for to mirror how its methods shifted with society.
Although the museum shall be thematic in construction, Nissen says the studio can be planning some chronological parts, corresponding to “the recreation of outlets from the Twenties, 50s and 80s”.
Over the following few months Nissen Richards will concentrate on designing the immersive points of the museum. Nissen explains that the studio has “an urge for food to work digitally”, as a way to add “extra drama” to the bigger areas.
Simonsson provides that the museum will include “inventive worlds which are immersive and scene setting to take folks again to a sure time or atmosphere”. The museum has a broad audience of faculty teams, households and people, which implies that the studio staff should “assume in layers” and take into account how completely different folks may absorb info, says Nissen.
Nissen Richards is working carefully with Purcell – the architects main new construct parts in addition to managing the repurposed historic buildings – to outline the scale of the museum’s areas together with new construct areas that can permit for “taller, extra dramatic shows”, Nissen says.
The Clarks Museum challenge remains to be in its infancy and the following step is to translate the preliminary idea into extra detailed designs.
