A developer’s museum at the top of Roppongi Hills, opened in October 2003.

The Mori Art Museum (森美術館, Mori Bijutsukan), known by its initials as MAM, is a contemporary art museum at the top of Roppongi Hills Mori Tower in Minato, Tokyo. It was founded by the developer Minoru Mori of Mori Building as part of Roppongi Hills, the mixed complex of offices, homes, shops and cultural spaces that opened in 2003. Japanese Wikipedia gives the opening date as 18 October 2003.

The location was the point. Japanese Wikipedia says the usual practice in a tower is to give the top floors, which command the highest rents, to offices or restaurants, but that Mori wanted Roppongi to become a cultural centre and chose to put a museum at the summit as its symbol, under the concept of placing culture above the economy, art above the offices. The museum’s own statement, signed by Minoru Mori as founder and Yoshiko Mori as its chairperson, says the plan was to make Roppongi Hills a model for future urban developments, with a new museum showing contemporary art and architecture at the top of the central tower, “a place visible from throughout Tokyo.”

That statement also gives the museum’s purpose in its own words: “a place for enjoyment, stimulation and discussion,” where what matters in culture and society is openly debated through exhibitions and through a range of learning programmes, for audiences from schoolchildren to senior citizens and from the local community to visitors from abroad. It says the museum regards becoming a platform for artists from Japan and East Asia as one of its missions.

The museum has had three directors. Japanese Wikipedia lists the British curator David Elliott from 2003 to 2006, Fumio Nanjo from November 2006 to December 2019, and Mami Kataoka from 2020. Japanese Wikipedia says that for its opening two years the museum ran its programme without a collection of its own. English Wikipedia says that in 2015 the museum was renovated and revised its mission statement, adding three programme strands alongside its large temporary exhibitions: MAM Collection, which builds and shows the museum’s own holdings of art from Japan and the Asia-Pacific in a small gallery, MAM Screen and MAM Research. English Wikipedia also notes the museum’s late opening hours.

A cone at the base, galleries on the 53rd floor and a Gluckman plan.

The museum is one part of a larger cultural floor. English Wikipedia says it belongs to the Mori Arts Center, which also takes in Tokyo City View, the observation deck, the Mori Arts Center Gallery, a museum shop and a café and restaurant. Visitors enter on the second floor of the tower through the Museum Cone, an elliptical glass structure around a high-speed lift that rises to the 52nd and 53rd floors. The galleries on the 53rd floor are themselves laid out in an elliptical sequence, with a stair in the centre leading up to the roof deck.

Japanese Wikipedia says the museum’s facilities were designed by the American architect Richard Gluckman, whose work includes projects for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and for the Guggenheim in Berlin. In Roppongi the museum works with the Suntory Museum of Art and the National Art Center, Tokyo under the joint name Roppongi Art Triangle.

The opening programme set the tone. English Wikipedia says the inaugural exhibition, Happiness: A Survival Guide for Art and Life, was curated by David Elliott with the guest curator Pier Luigi Tazzi, and mixed contemporary installation, sculpture and painting with classical Asian art, chiefly from Japan and China. It was followed in 2004 by Roppongi Crossing, a survey of new work by Japanese artists that Japanese Wikipedia describes as one of the museum’s main recurring exhibitions.

The current director came up through the museum. Bijutsu Techo reported on 8 January 2020 that Mami Kataoka had become director on 1 January, and that she had joined the museum in 2003 after working at the NLI Research Institute and as chief curator of the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery. The magazine said she became chief curator in 2009 and deputy director in October 2018, and that her exhibitions there included surveys of Ai Weiwei (2009) and Chiharu Shiota (2019). Outside the museum she was artistic director of the 21st Biennale of Sydney in 2018.

At a press conference on 8 January she set out five aims, the magazine reported, among them researching and showing contemporary art from the Asia-Pacific, connecting art with local communities, and building partnerships with other museums and biennales.

A glass cone, an elliptical gallery plan and a museum above the city.

Some art institutions hand their identity to artists rather than to a design agency. A painter or sculptor may draw the logotype, letter the façade or design a run of posters, and the mark then carries the hand of a particular person instead of a neutral corporate typeface. Others work the other way round and build an in-house studio: a small team of designers who sit beside the curators and produce the invitations, wall labels, catalogues and screens across the year. A team that close to the programme can follow it show by show, shifting colour and imagery from one season to the next while holding on to a few fixed rules, such as a single typeface, a poster grid or a set position for the name.

The façade is where passers-by meet that work. Banners hung between columns or across a glass front announce the current exhibition at street scale, and their size forces a plain layout: a name, a pair of dates and one image or a field of colour. Temporary architecture does similar work inside, where scenographers build walls, platforms and display furniture for each show and so change the character of the rooms from one exhibition to the next. Print workshops add another layer. A centre with its own press, screen-printing table or duplicator can make small editions, zines and posters with visiting artists, and those objects, with their limited inks and visible textures, come to stand for the institution as much as any logo does.

Bilingual print, custom signage fonts and a spectrum of waveforms from a London studio.

The identity came from Barnbrook, the London studio of the designer Jonathan Barnbrook. The studio says it worked with the museum for two years before the opening to create its branding, all of its bilingual printed matter, its merchandise and the custom fonts used for signage inside the building. For the opening exhibition, Happiness, the studio says it designed the graphics, publicity and catalogue, setting out to give Japanese and Western typography equal weight against the range of art in the show.

The museum’s mark also sits inside a larger family. Barnbrook dates its Mori Arts Center identity to 2004 and describes the brief: the centre at the top of Roppongi Hills was made up of five parts, the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo City View, the Roppongi Hills Club, the Tokyo Sky Deck and Roppongi Academy Hills, and each needed a logo that worked on its own but could be combined into a main Mori Arts Center logo. The studio says the idea of a spectrum, of viewpoints, light waves and colour, was central, so each section was given its own waveform, and the waveforms overlap in the main logo to show different activities working together. It also drew a custom typeface for the centre’s printed, environmental and navigational graphics.

The tower below has a related system. Barnbrook says it won an invited international competition for the Roppongi Hills logo, basing the concept on the meaning of the name Roppongi, six trees. Rather than one logo it made six, all built from the same structure of six circles, used interchangeably around the development, and it continued to produce event graphics and multilingual printed matter for Roppongi Hills in later years.

For a design guide, the Mori Art Museum shows how an identity can be built as part of a system: one wave in a spectrum of logos, bilingual from the start, with typefaces drawn for the signage of a single tower. Compare the M+ and teamLab guides. For this guide we use skyline indigo, tower night, Roppongi vermilion and glass haze with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Mori Art Museum’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.