City of Chicago
Citywide Lighting Framework Plan
Chicago, Illinois

85,000 SF • 7,900 SQ M

Davis Brody Bond recently led a diverse team of artists and consultants — including Chicago-based architects JGMA, engineers Buro Happold, lighting designers FMS, multi-sensory experience designers Obscura, KSLA, and Pentagram — in the design of a new Citywide Lighting Framework Plan (LFP) for the City of Chicago. The plan proposes scalable “platforms of light” grounded by the functional understanding of the networks, nodes, and strata which define the city. Through urban design, performance art, activation of the public realm, and a re-charge of the city’s collective imagination, the LFP will transform the atmosphere of the city into a highly interactive, unique environment.

The design team’s overarching concept for the LFP is “The Big C” — a territory defined by an offset series of rings that grow dynamically outward from the harbor to the loop and the ring once imagined by Daniel Burnham. The Big C is populated with both permanent and temporary lighting “platforms” that are flexible, programmable, and multi-functional by design. Platforms include: formal street, building, and sidewalk lighting; a series of scalable art and multi-media installations; and light-born from architecture and landscape which respond to seasonal flux.

The Chicago River forms the backbone of the project, providing a full-circle connection from Navy Pier, along the River, to the Museum Campus. This naturally connecting loop integrates the following spectacles of light: The Chicago River; The Firefly Park; The El; The Bridges; Lower Wacker Drive; The Buildings; The Observation Platform; and The Burnham Ring. To complete the loop, an observation platform is situated in the harbor along the ferry route.

NFL Draft Town Chicago. On the occasion of the 2016 NFL Draft in Chicago, Davis Brody Bond again collaborated with experience designers Obscura on a conceptual plan for “Draft Town Chicago,” a flexible experiential media platform for the NFL and its fans and sponsors. A natural outgrowth of the Lighting Framework Plan, Draft Town is a 24-hour-a-day modular platform for diverse programming and interactive experiences. Experiential draft-related media is delivered not only to the innovative structures and exhibit surfaces within NFL Draft Town but also — through the infrastructure established in the LFP — across Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods, landmarks, and transportation hubs, and into social and mobile media.

(Renderings by Davis Brody Bond with Obscura)