Kellenberger-White designed all signage and wayfinding for the expansion of Pembroke College at Cambridge University to encourage a sense of exploration and encounter throughout the newly connected spaces.

Pembroke, Cambridge’s third oldest college, features a chapel by Christopher Wren. The expansion by architects Haworth Tompkins includes the refurbishment of other historically significant buildings as well as the design of new buildings.

The signage therefore needed to be at once cohesive and sensitive to a range of building styles and surfaces. We achieved this using brass as the main material which we treated in various ways throughout the building: we used brass lettering on dark stained-wood lintels, laser-cut, stencilled typography on hand-sanded brass for sandstone walls, and screenprinted directly on white walls elsewhere.

This site-specific approach enabled us to enliven tradition and to harness the studio’s knowledge of craft and materials in service of an institutional identity.