The brands of tomorrow
A world-class building merits a world-class wayfinding system, helping its diverse users go about their business effortlessly.
The award-winning environment draws inspiration from the Scottish landscape borrowing forms of upturned boats from the shoreline and paintings of Charles Rennie Macintosh.
An entire campus of interconnected spaces, the building is tied together by a spectacular sky-lit ground floor to provide continuous circulation.
With a clear requirement for a definitive wayfinding strategy, we consulted to help rationalise the strategic design requirements for the whole experience, ensuring it extends beyond DDA legislation.
Striking a balance between traditional gravitas and modernist simplicity - drawing a firm line between accessibility and visual intrusion - every aspect of the system has been considered: from decision making points, materiality and surface halation, through to the design of typography and tactile maps.
Signs appear in English, Gaelic and Braille, with a provision for using touch screens in a further 15 languages. Elegant towers and wall-mounted signs push the boundaries of manufacturing using concrete and pre shaped laminate oak to counterpoint the building’s structural shell - subtly enhancing this, whilst working in harmony with the extraordinary architectural aesthetic.
Most importantly this project was delivered ahead of schedule and on budget! The unique quality and high design standards have earned the prestigious international Sign Design Society’s Award for ‘Wayfinding and Information Design’. The building itself has also won numerous awards for its architectural excellence.
Here’s a few...
Multiple awards – global recognition
2005
The Sign Design Society Awards
Edinburgh Architecture Association,
Centenary Medal
European Union Prize for Contemporary
Architecture Mies van der Rohe Award –
Short listed project
Scottish Design Awards ‘Best Publicly
Funded Building’
Scottish Design Awards ‘Architecture Grand Prix’
Manuel de la Dehesa award
Royal Fine Art Commission – ‘Urban & Landscape
Specialist Award’
RIAS Andrew Doolan Award for Architecture,
Best Building in Scotland
RIBA Stirling Prize
Overall Winner in the Concrete Society’s Awards for
Outstanding Structures
2006
Civic Trust Award
2007
Architectural Ironmongery Specification Awards