Museum of Apoxyomenos

Narrative through the Museum begins with a tube escalator taking you to the room containing necessary info about the sculpture, lined with black industrial rubber. Going forward, visitors reach small amphitheatre lined with hand-woven merino wool carpet. Fully carpeted room creates the feeling of a strange walk through a wheat field or on the seabed. Through the narrow red staircase visitors ascent forward, arriving to the Yellow Room, a space with mass of information, newspaper and Internet headlines related to the bronze athlete, his glory and travels. Visitors continue through the Olive passage, a winding space panelled with roughly trimmed olive wood and small niches with microclimatic chambers containing pieces of seeds and botany found inside the sculpture. The final scene is The White Room for Apoxyomenos, a completely monochrome and silent room with walls covered with translucent white canvas which emanates diffuse white light. The space on the top of the museum hosts an amphitheatre that mirrors the town of Mali Lošinj, where various sequences from the harbour are reflected in the ceiling.

Previous to architectural competition for the Museum it was decided by conservators that the outer walls of the old Palace where the new Museum will be built, should stay intact, while there were no rules for the interior. This is why architects decided to build a house within a house. Shaped white steel structure a body of the new Museum, has been inserted in a space defined by the exterior walls and the roof of the existing Kvarner Palace. The exhibition display that is happening inside of it is defined by the idea of passing through the building by visiting different and diverse scenes and transition zones in the rooms of the Museum, accompanied by the corresponding audio background. The Museum of Apoxyomenos and its exhibition represent the spatial materialization of the ceremony of passing through various ambiences on the way to the sculpture.

The steel construct, inserted into the walls of the former Palace, a space where the exhibition display is incorporated, is hung on the existing walls and steel structure. It is defined as the constructive and functional whole descending towards the ground floor of the existing building. The outer side of that steel "cage" is coated with smooth white tin with countless, deliberately irregular and erratic welds, which were done by welders from the Lošinj shipyard, and repainted in thick layer of white paint, as the form of a ship. In the interior of the Museum the exhibition rooms are lined with different materials and linings producing a variety of tactile sensations, which results in different spatial and physical experiences of the Museum itself on the way from the entrance of the museum to the climax of the tour - sculpture itself.