I am standing on a floating barge in the shadow of Paris’s Grand Palais and it’s pouring. Beyond the sounds of rain, there’s also hammers hammering and saws sawing. But Nicolas Laugero Lasserre, cofounder of the world’s first floating art museum, wants me to come “listen to the noise of the beach.”
Dressed in at least four shades of gray—Adidas shoes, jeans, a blazer, and a hoodie sweatshirt emblazoned with the word OBEY—the street art enthusiast brings me down a few steps to a horseshoe-shaped section across from the entrance. Here, architect Gérard Ronzatti has designed a 15-foot-wide ramp onto which water crashes.
“Hear that?” he asks, gesturing to the small waves hitting the side of the stainless steel structure docked on the Seine. “It’s poetry.”