Museum of Semiotic

The Museum of Semiotic translates the study of signs into architectural form, treating the building itself as a text to be read. Designed by Nathanael Hanli and set in Pasar Baru, Jakarta, the project takes Italo Calvino’s image of the city as a page of written language and asks how a museum can make that idea physical. As Calvino observes in Invisible Cities, the streets we cross “say everything you must think,” and the gaze that scans them records names rather than truths. The museum holds onto that tension between what a place declares and what a visitor freely perceives.

Through the exchange of signs, people communicate ideas and share belief. The sign system known as human language becomes the base of civilization, allowing complex intersubjective understandings to form. Though signs first appeared through speech, they extend into every product of human culture, including the built environment. A museum devoted to semiotics must therefore embody the relation between meaning (the signified) and symbol (the signifier), the two components that together form a sign.

Reading Space as Language

Hanli depicts the arbitrary bond between meaning and symbol as circular masses that are never perfect. The circles are cut and intersected, producing an ambiguity of meaning analogous to the phrases of a poem. Where most museums try to deliver a predetermined message, the Museum of Semiotic leaves interpretation open, and the spaces themselves become a kind of linguistic labyrinth. This approach echoes a long line of thought connecting building and language, in which architecture communicates through form, proportion, and sequence rather than words alone.

Designing a museum around interpretation rather than instruction reshapes the usual challenges of the building type. Circulation cannot follow a single corridor of fixed exhibits; instead the intersecting volumes invite wandering, doubling back, and chance encounters between spaces. Light, threshold, and the shifting boundaries of each circular mass guide perception without dictating it. In a dense urban quarter like Pasar Baru, one of the oldest shopping districts in Jakarta, such a structure offers a quiet counterpoint to the surrounding commercial signs. The result invites every visitor to author a slightly different reading of the same building.