Cool building, but where is the door?

The project brief sounds like an architecture school design-studio assignment: a cylinder is attached to an extruded triangle, set into a hill and bounded by streets on two of its three sides. As cool as that sounds to work on (it was!) there really isn’t any “front”, and with four different businesses there end up being a lot of different people who want to get in.

To address the lack of obvious entry we created a series of wayfinding layers:

• Create a common entry point: we turned an existing window into a door and added a stair at the building’s only inside corner. This helped create a focal point to the site design, from where one could enter any of the four spaces within a few steps.

• Craft a site experience: in addition to addressing stormwater, urban heat island and invasive species, the landscaping and walkways focuses users to the key entry point, and provides formal and secondary access paths.

• Infographics: Signage should be the last resort of any wayfinding strategy, and— as usual— less is more. Here we created a punchy, annotated info-graphic and located it at multiple key entry points to the site. Secondly, we used comically large address numbers on each door to allow differentiation from the street level. Finally, each space has a small, eye-level sign at its entry to create clarity for new visitors.