‘Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body’ at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, revisits the Paris Olympics of 1924, a seminal moment in changes to the way sport was represented – and coinciding with the city hosting the summer games one hundred years later.

Paris 1924 was the first truly international games, hosted in a multicultural city defined by art, jazz and fashion. The meeting of Paris’s modern styles with the Olympics’ classical inheritance created striking images and cultural impact for the event. As a moment in time, in the wake of World War One, attitudes to the body and physical fitness, gender, nationalism, race and class were changing as quickly as attitudes to art and music. The mass dissemination of print media, the rise of consumerism and the advent of commercial cinema turned medal-winners into marketable celebrities of the day.

The design for the six-section exhibition, each of which stresses a particular aspect of the games in its societal and cultural context, needed to enable moments of encounter with individual works and stories that would provoke emotional responses and require contemplative space – from the recorded voice of Harold Abrahams, looking back to 1924 and recounting his triumph in the 100m sprint, through Black athlete DeHart Hubbard’s letter full of resolve written to his mother as he was about to set sail for Paris, his extraordinary achievement yet to take place, to the unexpected triumph of the Uruguayan football side, who had travelled all the way from south America in steerage, going on to mesmerise Europe with their skill on the pitch and winning gold.

Nissen Richards Studio’s design approach was to create a spatial narrative that would immerse the audience, inviting them to participate and not be mere spectators. Various design and theatrical techniques of scale, vista, display and film were used to bring the exhibition to life, creating a strong sense of place and time and communicating spectacle and drama, so that visitors would become involved in the stories of great human endeavour the Olympics always delivers.

The team’s designs sought to celebrate the human body in motion via 3D interventions that are dynamic and rhythmic – and always implying movement. The colour palette references the original graphics and visual representations of Paris 1924, whilst the graphic scope includes banners and wallpaper; exhibition and section introductions; showcase backdrops and object labels featuring bespoke typography.