Takanabe Ninomaru Historic Museum by Tomohiro Kaji is a highly esteemed winner of the very prestigious 2025 Golden A' Design Award in Cultural Heritage and Culture Industry Design Competition Category.
GoldCultural Heritage· 2025
Takanabe Ninomaru Historic Museum
Client: Takanabe Town Hall
Golden A' Design Award Winner in Cultural Heritage Category
Verified Award Winner
Verify Award Status for #167822The Design
About Takanabe Ninomaru Historic Museum
Takanabe Historical Museum, established in 1986, was reimagined to address declining visitor engagement due to outdated exhibits. The redesign embraced JIN, the philosophy of benevolence, transforming it into a cultural and educational hub fostering civic pride. Through visual storytelling and spatial design, the renewal introduced thematic curation, immersive exhibitions, and layered acrylic panels symbolizing historical continuity. Renamed Ninomaru History Museum, it now serves as an interactive space where heritage, education, and community connect.
The Recognition
About the Golden A' Design Award
Takanabe Ninomaru Historic Museum is a Golden A' Design Award winner, an immensely prestigious recognition granted to first-rate, marvelous, and outstanding designs. Golden winners are exceedingly innovative, visionary, and glamorously dazzling creations that reflect the prodigy, wisdom, and prowess of their designers. Takanabe Ninomaru Historic Museum is expected to be a highly praised, trendsetting, and monumental invention that delivers unprecedented value. This Golden A' Design Award-winning design is a spectacular, respected project that highly benefits and advances the boundaries of art, science, design, and technology. Takanabe Ninomaru Historic Museum creates intense feelings of desire, evokes passion, encourages creativity, and fascinates us.
Where to Get It
Strategic Branding and Exhibition Design
We transform brands and cultural spaces through strategic design. Our award-winning expertise spans global branding, visual storytelling, and spatial experiences. From brand identity to museum exhibitions, we create compelling narratives that connect audiences with heritage, products, and ideas.
Discuss Your ProjectInterviews
Grand Interview
Your innovative transformation of Takanabe Ninomaru Historic Museum through visual storytelling and spatial design has garnered significant recognition, including the Gold A' Design Award - could you elaborate on how you developed the concept of JIN (benevolence) as the philosophical foundation for this cultural revival project?
Philosophical Foundation: JINThe project established JIN (benevolence), a Confucian virtue, as its central philosophical framework. Rooted in the ethical principles of the Akizuki clan that once governed Takanabe, this concept aimed not merely to restore the physical structure but to reconstruct the civic and moral values embedded within the region’s historical context. By integrating JIN into spatial composition and information design, the project re-contextualized historical ethics as a contemporary civic principle, transforming an abstract virtue into a tangible social form through design.
The acrylic panel installation at Takanabe Ninomaru Historic Museum, displaying successive lords and their policies with a red gradient symbolizing historical continuity, creates a striking visual narrative - what inspired this specific design choice and how does it enhance visitors' understanding of local heritage?
Acrylic Panels and the Red GradientThe acrylic panels depicting successive lords and their policies were designed to visualize the temporal continuity inherited across generations. Through the use of transparent acrylic with a red gradient, the design enables visitors to perceive the accumulation of time as overlapping layers of varying density. This visual system allows history to be understood not as a collection of discrete events but as an interconnected chain of succession and transformation. The gradation of color symbolizes the deepening of collective memory over time.
Given the challenge of limited historical materials and budget constraints at Takanabe Ninomaru Historic Museum, how did you leverage graphic and spatial design elements to create an immersive exhibition experience that effectively engages modern audiences?
Exhibition Design under ConstraintsFaced with limited archival materials and a restricted budget, the project emphasized narrative construction through graphic and spatial design. Controlled use of light, texture, and typographic hierarchy allowed for an immersive experience without dependence on artifact volume. Minimal visual language and rhythmic sequencing compensated for material scarcity, promoting intellectual focus and emotional engagement. This approach demonstrates how spatial semiotics can serve as an effective interpretive strategy in heritage presentation.
Behind the Design
Press Kit
Credits, team members and technical details provided by the designer.
- Unique Properties
- This design centers on the concept of a history of benevolence, creating a space that visually and intuitively conveys the region's heritage through storytelling. Located on the historic site of Takanabe Castle, the museum was renamed and redesigned as a cultural hub to rediscover the town's uniqueness and foster civic pride. From curation and visual identity to signage and narrative design, the space was fully reimagined to serve as an educational and inspiring environment.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Scale:
Site area: 7,763 meter square
Building area: 904.43 meter square
1st floor area: 461.58 meter square
2nd floor area: 442.85 meter square - Tags
- historical museum, cultural heritage, exhibition design, storytelling, visual identity, graphic design, spatial design, civic engagement, SDGs
- Production Technology
- This exhibition uses graphic and spatial design to make history visually engaging. The entrance features a concept display with a tagline, while the first exhibition room includes zoning signs with symbolic designs. The second exhibition presents Takanabe Domain's history, the Meirindo school, and the 7th lord Akizuki Taneshige's SDGs-related policies. At the center, acrylic panels display successive lords and their policies, with a red gradient symbolizing historical continuity.
- Design Challenge
- The biggest challenge of this project was creating an engaging exhibition with limited historical materials and budget. From a historical and social perspective, extensive document research and discussions with experts were conducted to highlight the region's uniqueness, shaping the exhibition narrative around the culture of human development. As large-scale renovations were not feasible, we utilized graphic and spatial design to create a visually compelling and immersive exhibition.
- Research
- This study aimed to revitalize a historical museum through design and narrative. The objective was to enhance visitor engagement, promote cultural heritage preservation, and foster civic pride. The methodology included comparative studies of museums and interviews with historians. We introduced content curation and visual solutions. By highlighting the region's unique history of human development, we proposed a narrative-driven exhibition design, enhancing historical understanding.
- Inspiration
- This project was inspired by the need to revitalize a declining local region by restoring its historical museum. Established in 1986 under the Akizuki domain, the museum's outdated exhibits led to a decline in visitor engagement. With the town's rich history in education and culture, revitalizing its significance was crucial. The goal was to transform the museum into a cultural hub where people can learn, connect, and take pride in their heritage and traditions.
- Project Duration
- The project began in autumn 2023 in Miyazaki, Japana and finished in December 2024.
- Operation Flow
- This exhibition utilizes visual storytelling to help visitors intuitively understand the region's history. The layout is designed for a sequential experience, guiding visitors through zoned spaces categorized by theme and era, ensuring a natural flow of information. The design creates an immersive experience where history is learned through narratives, while layered acrylic panels symbolize temporal connections, resulting in a visually engaging and easily comprehensible exhibition.
- Image Credits
- Illustrations: Tomohiro Kaji
Image #1-#5: Photographer Kai Kanno (Nacasa & Partners)
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