The simple, robust design of Falmouth's National Maritime Museum is a modern tribute to the town's history as a working harbour. Designed by Long & Kentish Architects.

The large robust timber structure evokes the boat sheds, sail lofts and warehouses that once serviced the town and made it one of the most important ports in the world during the 19th Century. It will provide a fitting and permanent home for 150 small craft, a collection gradually acquired by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. The museum will also house the Cornwall Maritime Museum collection, a local collection of ship's logs and similar small, but important, artefacts.

Construction of the Museum posed a number of interesting technical and environmental challenges, including building part of the Museum over the dock wall into the harbour, constructing a gallery below sea level and developing a design that could use the natural environment to assist in controlling the internal conditions of the galleries to reduce energy usage.

The museum is part of an ambitious redesign of the Discovery Quay area of the town, and its western elevation provides a backdrop to a performance area which is part of a new public events square. The development brings a much-needed injection of life to the town. Adding to the success of the Eden Project, it is likely to reinforce Cornwall's reputation as an international visitor destination.

Up close the building really is stunning and though the overall form of the building is very simple, details catch your eye at every turn; for example, the blinkered windows used to prevent overlooking onto adjacent residential buildings. However, the real joy of the building is in the way that the wonderful Cornish light has been harnessed to exploit the inherent natural beauty of the surface of the green oak.

Entering the museum off the new public square the first space the visitor sees is a cavernous `black box'. Here the exhibited vessels are linked to interactive audio visual displays, which describe the ships, how they were built, and how they were sailed. The whole inner wall is an audio visual screen with front and back projectors meaning that the box can simulate a range of conditions at sea, such as a storm, or dense fog to give the non-sailor an experience of what it is like to be in these conditions and how boats cope. The experience is dramatic.