About Atria
We think buildings should explain themselves.
An atrium is the part of a building that tells you where you are. We took the name because that is the job: to make a large, complicated place immediately legible to the person standing in it.
Our position
Wayfinding has been treated as a signage problem for a very long time.
Signs are designed once and then slowly diverge from the building around them. Departments move, wings are refurbished, services change their names, and every affected sign becomes a small, permanent inaccuracy that nobody owns.
We started Atria on a different premise: that if a building is properly understood by a system, directions can be produced on demand, for the building as it stands today, for the particular person asking. Everything we build follows from that.
- Directions should come from the building, not from a separately maintained map.
- A route nobody can walk is worse than no route at all.
- Accessible routes are ordinary routes, offered without anybody having to explain themselves.
- Visitors should not have to install anything to find a lift.
- The model of your estate should belong to you, and should outlast any one use of it.
If the building has been understood properly, the directions look obvious. That is the whole craft.
How we engage
A deliberate, low-disruption way of working.
We are a specialist team rather than a large vendor, and we work accordingly: closely, on one site at a time, with a short route to something you can see.
A building, not a brochure
We begin with a real site of yours and the journeys through it that cause the most difficulty, so that the first thing you judge is your own building rather than a generic example.
Modelled with minimal imposition
We work from the records you already hold and confirm them on site. There is no construction, no hardware to fit, and very little required of your team.
Extended at your pace
A first building establishes the value and the method. Further buildings, and further uses of the model, follow when you are ready for them.
Our products
Two names you will hear us use.
Pathfinder
The guidance your visitors use: clear directions from wherever they are standing to wherever they need to be, on their own phone, with nothing to install.
How Pathfinder worksCartel — Cartographic Intelligence
The understanding beneath it: an accurate, connected model of your estate that knows how spaces join up, who may pass through them, and when.
Explore CartelWhere we are
Working with founding partners.
Atria is an early-stage company. We are currently working with a small number of founding partner organisations, which means the sites we take on receive a level of attention that will not always be available — and that partners have real influence over what we build next.
If your estate is difficult to navigate and you would rather shape a solution than buy a finished one, this is a good moment to talk to us.
Tell us about a building.
The conversation we most enjoy starts with a site that visitors find hard, and what it costs you when they do.