MoN Takanawa, the Museum of Narratives, isn’t a museum at all—at least not in the sense that you will find static displays behind glass there. Instead, its goal is to show that culture is a living story that we all share, connecting past to present, place to idea, and language to language, in an ever-repeating loop.
Designers at Pentagram developed a new identity for MoN that visualized the idea of “dimensional time—the understanding that while we experience time as linear, ideas, traditions and culture don’t behave that way. They recur, get reinterpreted, loop back to find new meaning in a different age.”
The museum’s building was designed to represent this same spiral. It is Takanawa Gateway City’s only low-rise structure, and its exterior uses wood and native Japanese plants to create a spiral that connects the Earth with the sky with rotational pattern.
The logo that Pentagram created uses a modified spiral which can be read as “M,” “O,” and “N” when stationary, but in motion, it symbolizes the constantly evolving, living narrative. It is built with three colors—red for the sun, green for the Earth, and blue for the sea—which represent the natural environment of Takanawa.
A color-matched bar is another important piece of the new identity. From the Pentagram website: “[It is] the narrative thread, before it coils. Where the spiral carries the concept, the bars do the practical work of holding and framing content across layouts.”
https://www.pentagram.com/work/mon-takanawa-the-museum-of-narratives