40,000 peo­ple, 17,000 apart­ments: the Märkische Quar­ter in Berlin places great de­mands on ori­en­ta­tion. The large hous­ing de­vel­op­ment was de­signed in the 1960s by na­tion­ally and in­ter­na­tion­ally recog­nised ar­chi­tects. Build­ings of the same con­struc­tion type bor­der onto sev­eral streets and are con­nected through large court­yards and parks. The owner, Gesobau, wanted an ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem that not only made it eas­ier for peo­ple to find their way but also, through sim­ple and friendly de­sign, en­hanced the im­age of the neigh­bour­hood and strength­ened the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the res­i­dents with their neigh­bour­hood. To­gether with the pro­duc­tion de­sign­ers Gries and von Kamptz, Moni­teurs de­vel­oped a fam­ily of signs and a colour street map of the area. Ground plans mark the walk­ways and the fa­cil­i­ties of the in­fra­struc­ture.

Märkisches Vier­tel is an ur­ban quar­ter in Berlin, a large hous­ing es­tate with al­most 40,000 res­i­dents, cov­er­ing a space of 3.2 square km, the ori­en­ta­tion of which is dif­fi­cult. In 2006, Moni­teurs worked closely with this city dis­trict and de­vel­oped, un­der con­tract of Gesobau AG, an ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem for sev­eral groups of apart­ment blocks. In 2013, the dis­trict au­thor­ity of Reinick­endorf held a com­pe­ti­tion to de­velop a new ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem, which Moni­teurs won. Dur­ing the ini­tial phase, Moni­teurs con­sulted closely with the Berlin of­fice PSY:PLAN, so that the pro­ject would achieve suc­cess both ar­chi­tec­turally and in terms of psy­cho­log­i­cal per­cep­tion.

Moni­teurs not only de­signed the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem in­side, but also out­side the build­ing – from the signs for foot pas­sen­gers and cy­clists to the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem for the car parks. The con­sis­tent ap­pli­ca­tion of a sin­gle graphic con­cept cre­ates a uni­form ap­pear­ance for the en­tire air­port site. The pic­togram fam­ily icons were ex­panded to in­clude site-spe­cific lo­ca­tions such as the vis­i­tor cen­tre and the Air­port City.