Abstract
Only two years after its official invention in 1850 by Robert Warington, the first public aquarium opened in Regent’s Park in London. Spurred on by the British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, its aim is still exclusively scientific when the organization and the design of the tanks remain sober. These instruments, both means and objects of exhibition, show « a stable community of aquatic organisms that can be viewed, not from above through the opacity of flowing waters with surface ripples, but eye-to-eye and from the side through transparent glass and clear water » (Stephen Jay Gould, « Seeing Eye to Eye, Through a Glass Clearly », in Les Coquillages de Léonard, Paris, Le Seuil, 2001, pp. 66-83). Following the example of the zoo, to which it is related, the encounter between man and animals allowed by the aquarium is inseparable from the necessary boundary placed between the public and the exhibited nature. More or less visible, this boundary quickly becomes one of the main concerns of wildlife park designers who want to minimize the presence of this partition. While bars or wire fence can be replaced by ditches, the aquarium can’t avoid its glass screen or, today, its acrylic screen. However, very rapidly, the architects work to break down this barrier due to the exhibition of many volumes of water. Within the framework of this paper, we want to address the different imagined apparatuses aimed at bringing closer man and fauna in public aquariums since the XIXth century. Through historical and contemporary examples, of which the Aquarium of Paris in 1900, we will observe various innovations involved in exhibition scenography, from the design of the tanks to numerous attractions integrating the visitor.