Our work with UAL began at Camberwell College of Arts, where we developed a clear, robust and highly legible wayfinding strategy, rooted in the discipline of the UAL identity while remaining responsive to the lived realities of the campus. It was conceived to be agile, direct, pared back and adaptable, designed to support intuitive navigation across a complex academic environment without over-instruction, allowing the character of the place and its occupants to lead.
At Chelsea College of Arts, Millbank, we were invited to extend and evolve that approach within a very different architectural and historical context. Housed in the former Royal Army Medical College, the campus is a collection of Edwardian red-brick buildings with stone detailing, arranged with a kind of formal assurance around an oblong parade ground. There is an orderliness to them – precise, composed, faintly theatrical – that feels almost improbably intact, as though Mary Poppins herself might turn a corner at any moment.
And yet the shift in use could hardly be more profound. What was once a military teaching and research hospital is now an art school for 1,400 students. Spaces that treated soldiers for war wounds, shell shock, gangrene – and during one particularly unforgiving winter, injuries caused by frozen, mud-caked kilt pleats – are now occupied by students exploring materials, ideas and forms. Workshops, library and gallery spaces support practices ranging from metalwork to ceramics, photography to textiles; the building has not lost its intensity, only transformed its purpose.
Chelsea’s alumni list reads as a roll call of contemporary art: David Hockney, Anish Kapoor, Elisabeth Frisk, Chris Ofili among them, and the institution continues to position itself at the centre of creative and critical practice.
As the Pro Vice-Chancellor and Head of Colleges for Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon, had noted: complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity are among the most vital skills for the future. It is a context that aligns naturally with our own way of working.
Our role at Chelsea was to carry forward the Camberwell strategy, adapting it to suit the spatial and perceptual conditions of the site. The architecture here is more compact, with shorter sight lines and tighter transitions, requiring a recalibration of scale and placement. We retained the clarity and authority of the UAL brand, applying matt, sealed vinyl typography directly onto the walls… integrated, unframed, and confident… while carefully rescaling elements to ensure legibility and presence within these more intimate spaces.
As with all our work, the approach is both functional and experiential: wayfinding that reveals itself as needed, supporting movement without dominating it. Navigation is reinforced not only through signage but through the lived culture of the college itself. Twelve feature walls, dedicated to student artwork, act as landmarks within the campus – points of orientation that are also expressions of ownership. They make it clear that this is a place of making, questioning and becoming.
The result is a quiet continuity between past and present, where wayfinding does more than direct; it helps articulate a shift in identity, allowing the building to hold its history, and place in time, while fully inhabiting its new life.
