MASS MoCA is the largest contemporary art museum in the United States, housed on a vast seventeen-acre industrial campus. Commissioned by the museum’s leadership for the final phase of a twenty-year masterplan, the design team developed a family of wayfinding elements that help various users (art tourists, wedding guests, festival attendees, curious visitors, and the nearby population) navigate a complex aggregation of open and enclosed spaces to enhance a memorable cultural experience.

The project extends an already strong brand with new guides, customized typography, and a series of totemic wayfinding elements. These panels are crafted from two-inch-thick steel that remained from an earlier art installation, creating a strong identity that parallels the institution’s merging of artworks with its industrial past.

The timeframe for the project was quick—four months from an agreement to opening day—and our solutions had to be nimble in the face of production schedules and the pressures of an aggressive construction schedule.

We met frequently with the museum team, conducting interviews and informational sessions, surveying guests, and repeatedly walking the campus to develop strategic locations for external signage as well as internal markers that did not compete with a strong curatorial program, but allowed for touch points that reassured visitors that they were indeed in the right place. As part of this process, a family of signage and place-making types emerged that embraced the material strategy of the architectural interventions (exposing the raw materials of the existing structures, not painting anything that was subsequently introduced to make the gallery spaces functional), the institutional brand and type (red, Futura), and the do-it-yourself ethos that the museum exhibits pervasively. Each of these were challenges that the team embraced to make a cohesive system.