UVA Children’s:
Entrance Murals

After FREN completed the Explorer Playroom for UVA Children’s, we were invited back to create entrance murals for the various units of their inpatient facilities. The hospital is laid out in a peculiar way: the four-story Battle building for pediatric outpatients, and the seventh floor of the main building dedicated solely to the inpatients of the children’s hospital. Our goal was to come up with distinct environmental cues to distinguish the areas while continuing to work within the theme of outdoors and wildlife.

We started by establishing four environments to match the four colors of the hospital’s official color scheme. The Battle Building already had green, purple, blue, and orange in that order from bottom to top to designate each of its floors, so we continued this scheme to match four biomes by their elevation: the river, the plains, the forest, and the mountain respectively. Now, you may think it’s more natural to rearrange those colors and match the blue to the watery river and the green to the leafy forest. It may be more natural, but it’s not nearly as memorable nor magical, and the results speak for themselves. Each distinct area was also given its own native animal mascot to make each entrance even more identifiable and to give visitors better landmarks to find their way through the hospital.