Across 40 acres along the Seattle waterfront, Expedia Group’s new campus headquarters houses almost 1 million square feet of work and collaboration space, a food hall, two parking garages, a transportation hub, and its own beach on Elliot Bay. It’s a city within a city, and the headquarters for a global team of employees spanning time zones, hemispheres and cultures.
Studio SC partnered with Expedia and ZGF Architects to develop a wayfinding system that celebrates the company’s ethos that travel is a force for good, providing a systematic approach to finding destinations on campus.
Using travel and city exploration as a point of inspiration, the wayfinding program is designed to mimic city navigation using street names, addresses, and landmarks throughout the campus to help people get to their destinations.
Interior wayfinding signage uses a street addressing system for identification of workspaces and conference rooms, integrated into building walls, columns, and the floors, and clustered at major intersections. The primary pathways within buildings, and the thoroughfares that connect buildings, are identified as streets with individual destinations (conference rooms, offices, and workstations) identified through numerical addresses that correspond to floor level and distance away from the pathway. Typography and graphics are clean and modern to reflect the architectural character of the buildings and the technological nature of Expedia’s business, harkening back to travel through their inspiration from transportation graphics.
Together, the wayfinding system acts as a metaphor for a journey; from plotting a path using a map to knowing when to turn down the next road. It incorporates a sense of exploration and the company’s travel roots, and that lends itself to an engaging experience navigating campus.
