A museum of things that wear out

The Institute holds around four thousand material samples — alloys, polymers, coatings, textiles — kept specifically so their degradation can be studied. Nothing in the collection is preserved. Everything is allowed to corrode, yellow, embrittle and fail on schedule.

An identity for that collection could not credibly be pristine.

Specification as a visual language

Every object in the collection arrives with a specification sheet: composition, date of manufacture, exposure conditions, current state. That document, not the objects, became the model for the identity. The typographic system is built from the same components — a fixed-width label column, a rule, a value — and it is used at every scale from a specimen tag to the building’s façade.

The result is an identity that does not describe the Institute so much as extend its own filing convention. Staff adopted it immediately, because it was already how they wrote.

Materials that were allowed to age

Signage is unlacquered brushed aluminium and raw brass, specified without protective coating against the fabricator’s advice. Both will dull and mark. The wayfinding drawings include a note on expected patination at two, five and ten years, which is the sort of thing a design manual normally exists to prevent.

Interior labels are letterpress on uncoated stock, in one colour, printed in runs small enough to be reset when the specimen data changes — which it does, continuously, because that is the entire purpose of the collection.

Catalogue

The 340-page catalogue is set in a single family at three sizes, with the photography shot flat, evenly lit, and without styling. Objects are reproduced at actual size wherever the trim allows, with the scale noted where it does not. There is no art direction in it beyond the decision to have none.