Great Ormond Street Hostpital Continued

Working on a pro bono basis, Landor Associates has created two distinct wayfinding systems for Great Ormond Street childrens' Hospital (GOSH).
The first (which has already been implemented) sees each of the hospital's six buildings take on a particular colour identity to make navigation through the various buildings easier. And the second, which has been specifically devised for the yet-to-be completed Llewelyn Davies Yeang designed Morgan Stanley Clinic Building (MSCB), is based on the natural world. A host of different animal characters will help visitors to the building find their way around, as well as put children at ease in the environment.

The team at Landor came up with a more complex wayfinding system (which will first be implemented in the new MSCB when it opens in 2012, but which may well extend to the rest of the hospital in time) that has two purposes, to direct and also distract.

The natural world-based system takes into account the fact that many wards in the hospital are already named after animals. The basic idea is that each floor of the building takes on a natural world theme, with the lower ground floor being under the sea.

Each ward on each floor is then named after an animal that is associated with that particular environment - and they can appear in corridors to help guide people to them.

Landor Associates has created a guidelines document for GOSH (pages shown above) detailing how the scheme should function so that the redevelopment team from Great Ormond Street Hospital, with support from Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity, can implement it when the building work on the Morgan Stanley Clinical Building is complete. The design team at Landor have also made themselves available for further consultation on the project too.