The University of Liverpool is home to one of the oldest and most influential schools of architecture in the country. The Liverpool School of Architecture has taught the discipline since the 1890s, counts Sir James Stirling among its alumni, and names its rooms after the people who shaped it, from the Reilly Room to the Budden Lecture Theatre. Its students spend their days studying exactly how buildings are put together, which makes it about the most design-literate audience any signage will ever have to satisfy.
For its redeveloped home the School brought together a Georgian terrace on Abercromby Square, the 1930s Leverhulme Building and a later extension with a bold new addition by architects O’Donnell + Tuomey, weaving four eras into a single legible building of around 9,220 square metres. Exposed glulam roof trusses, board-marked concrete and red oxide steelwork give the interior its character. xsign was appointed to deliver the wayfinding and signage scheme throughout, from the entrance totem down to the smallest door tag.
Few buildings put signage under closer scrutiny than a school of architecture. Everything on the wall would be read, every day, by staff and students who teach and study this exact kind of detail. The scheme had to be quietly excellent, and it had to hold its own against a confident palette of concrete, timber and red oxide steel rather than sit apart from it.
The building itself is a composite of four periods, so one family of signs had to land cleanly on very different surfaces: board-marked and fair-faced concrete, plastered walls, exposed brick, timber-lined openings and full-height glazing. A detail that looks considered on smooth plaster can look like an afterthought on raw concrete.
A teaching building also never stands still. Studios are reallocated, rooms are renamed and cohorts move around the building from one academic year to the next. A scheme printed and bonded to the wall would be out of date within a term, so the University needed something its own team could keep current without redecorating.
Built to be changed. The heart of the scheme is xsign’s patented Jigsaw™ modular system: a concealed wall rail carrying lockable, interchangeable panels. Each directory and wayfinding sign is built from brushed stainless steel and painted aluminium, finished in the University’s oxide red with a signal-yellow band for the statutory house rules. When a room is renamed or a studio moves, one panel slides out and a replacement slides in, with no marks left on the wall and no sign remade from scratch. In a building whose contents change every year, the wayfinding changes with them.
A first point of orientation. A freestanding Jigsaw™ totem greets visitors at the entrance, listing every level and destination on the same interchangeable panels, so the directory at the door is as easy to keep current as the ones upstairs.
Legible at a glance. Oversized level letters, cut in vinyl and applied straight onto the red oxide lift cores, mark each floor from G to 2 so clearly that they read the length of an open studio. The oxide red was chosen to sit with the building’s own red steelwork rather than compete with it.
Down to the last door. Brushed stainless steel and aluminium room signs identify named spaces such as the Reilly Room, while slim acrylic door tags carry each room number and space reference. Double-sided projecting signs mark the toilets, stairs and lecture theatre, and printed floor-plan directories carrying the University of Liverpool crest orient people level by level. Everything is set in a single typeface and tape-fixed where it can be, so nothing penetrates the architects’ finishes.
The scheme was surveyed on site and installed in phases as each area of the fit-out was handed over, working to the live site programme. Setting out on board-marked concrete and around exposed services meant agreeing every position on site rather than resolving it on a drawing, so that fixings stayed hidden and each sign sat square to the architecture.
Because the wayfinding runs on the interchangeable Jigsaw™ system, the building was handed over ready to look after itself: the School’s own team can re-letter a room or reorder a directory in minutes as studios change hands. The result is a scheme worthy of the audience that uses it, and one that will still read correctly long after the first cohort has moved on.
