Design concept “Seeing a touch of red-Gazing at National Keelung Girls' Senior High School” is inspired from the poem “Port of Mists”, a depiction of Keelung’s seascape by the legendary Taiwanese poet Zheng Chou-Yu. Reflecting on Master Zheng’s techniques of “feeling vs. scenery, meaning vs. image”, this project incarnates a new poem in a wayfinding system, which turns spiritual features from the girls’ school into real signages, guiding users between historical tradition and contemporary time.
With a glance at red and white hues on the campus buildings, the design team cherish a power of vitality in the environment and attempt to reinterpret the poetic “feeling, meaning” via “scenery and image” by creating a user friendly wayfinding system on campus, in order to guide visitors to find directions successfully.
Design highlights include 1. Reshaping school image: introducing design thinking of subtractive design onto campus; 2. Internationalizing wayfinding language: the basic guide information is a Chinese-English dual lingual system. A new language Japanese, plus a culture-echoing color identity, is added to enhance the shrine area guidance, subtly for foreign pilgrims easily to find their way and cherish the memory of their loved ones; 3. The three-dimensional map: a 2D map upgraded into three-dimensional layout of site plan shows relative conditions of the actual topography with a height difference of 37 meters.
Whether it is the signage on the north, south campus, or the centuries-old shrine site, a systematic wayfinding design can guide users between historical tradition and contemporary time, thus integrating rich expressions within an aesthetic environment nourishing old and new.