Location: Kohler, Wisconsin

Lighting Design: CharterSIlls

Architect: Gensler

Client: Kohler

This one-story, 100,000 square-foot building was designed to bring all of Kohler’s creative groups under one roof, encouraging collaboration. Large expanses of glass help tie the interior to the landscape and provide abundant daylight for employees.  Daylight responsive controls and dimming are used to tune the lighting. The building’s signature element, “The Beacon”, is made of perforated weathered steel and backlit with 3000k metal halide lights.

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Lighting Design: CharterSIlls

Architect: Ronan Architects

Client: Poetry Foundation

This 26,000 square-foot building is the new home for the Poetry Foundation, one of the world’s largest, independent non-profit literary organizations.  A perforated zinc exterior and expansive glass provide a transparency that encourages accessibility and visibility of poetry to the public. The lighting program is straightforward and unobtrusive. Entire walls and ceilings are bathed in 3500k fluorescent, to visually expand the space and provide a welcoming night-time glow.

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Lighting Design: CharterSIlls

Architect: Loewenberg Architects

Client: Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group

For the first Radisson Blu-branded property in the United States, designer Jim Hamilton of Graven Images wanted to pay tribute to the history and industry of the Windy City through the use of materials to create a visual and tactile experience.  The front reception feature wall was created from geometric corten metal panels with glowing bands of custom length LED linear fixture placed between.  A cloud of decorative glass pendant fixtures provide general illumination and custom backlit reception pods complete the space that is both contemporary and compelling.

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Lighting Design: CharterSIlls

Architect: Gensler

Client: Genevieve and Wayne Gratz

A modern addition to one of Chicago’s most recognized religious institutions, the 80,000 square-foot Gratz Center is home to classrooms, multipurpose spaces, a dining facility and a 350 person chapel.  This LEED Silver certified building artfully blends fluorescent, LED and incandescent light sources, bringing the best attributes of each to the overall design. Central dimming and daylight responsive controls add flexibility and ease maintenance costs.

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Lighting Design: CharterSIlls

Architect: GREC

Client: Gerding Edlen

In Chicago’s hot up and coming West Loop neighborhood, EMME residential tower sits at the site of the 1886 Haymarket Riot. A memorial sculpture by artist Mary Brogger marks the entrance to a small pocket park that tenants and visitors must traverse to reach the setback entry. Illuminated by linear ingrounds, tree uplights, and spill light from the double height lobby the park provides a comfortable atmosphere for relaxing and enjoying the urban bustle of the neighborhood.

In the lobby, the geometric fabric wrapped acoustical ceiling panels were designed to create two pockets to help conceal architectural track lighting. One pocket illuminates the large abstract painting in the lobby and the other highlights the glass walkway above reception.

Throughout the building, architectural downlights were kept to a minimum. Instead, perimeter coves and integrated millwork light details were developed with linear LED strips to help define the edges of the spaces with light and highlight specialty finishes. Where downlights are utilized, fixtures are placed into groupings, rather than an even distribution to help create contrast in the light levels and allow for more uninterrupted ceilings. This contributed to lower energy usage and a building LEED Gold rating.

Building residential units include glowing surface mounted fixtures at entries and integrated linear lighting at both the top and bottom of cabinet installations help to provide a soft uplight to accent the exposed concrete ceilings.

All public spaces are controlled by a lighting control system with time clock triggered scenes that adjust automatically for time of day. Lounges and the fitness center utilize occupancy to reduce energy usage in less high traffic spaces and touchscreen controllers allow for easy adjustments by building staff.  

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Lighting Design: CharterSIlls

Architect: Gensler

Client: BP Products of North America

BP American Offices in Chicago is a unique project that entails a large scale trading floor, open office workspace, conference rooms, and several food service areas. The trading floor space is the feature of the office and is the real showcase of the project.  The space is located in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Center at 30 South Wacker, which holds views of the city skyline on the east side and the Chicago River on the west side. The project acheived LEED Platinum, and the lighting is currently 35% under the ASHRAE 2004 standards.

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Lighting Design: CharterSIlls

Architect: HPA and The Gettys Group

Client: Carey Watermark Investors

With its prime location on the winding Chicago River, the Renaissance Chicago Downtown Hotel is at the heart of Chicago's business, theater, shopping and recreation.  The hotel's recent $32 million renovation focused on making a bold statement, inside and out.  The modern exterior leads to an expansive first floor interior including guestrooms and corridors.  A third-floor rooftop space maximizes enviable river views.  CharterSills collaborated with Hartshore Plunkard Architecture (HPA) and The Gettys Group to provide transformative lighting that supported the goals for this new downtown icon.

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Lighting Design: CharterSIlls

Architect: Lucien Lagrange Architects

Client: The Gettys Group

Located near Grant Park in Chicago’s South Loop, the Blackstone Hotel, built in 1910, was restored to its former glory and given an updated, modern design scheme that is playfully integrated within the Beaux-Arts style historic landmark building. The biggest challenge was to provide lighting that was appropriate to the space, compatible with landmark standards, but also met modern light level and code requirements. Almost all of the public spaces within the building had maintained their original fixtures.

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Lighting Design: CharterSIlls

Architect: Goettsch Partners

Client: Amtrak

The iconic Great Hall inside Chicago’s Union Station was designed in 1925 by renowned architecture firm Graham, Anderson, Probst, & White. To correct flaws in the original design that had contributed to water leakage and deterioration over time, a 42 month project was undertaken to provide substantial repairs and improvements to the space.

To begin, the architectural design team renovated the station’s iconic 219-foot long skylight, which experienced extensive moisture damage over the past several decades. With the goal to restore the cast-iron skylight assembly while maintaining its historic appearance, the architectural team designed an energy-efficient, modern skylight above the original structure. Supported 5 feet above the restored cast-iron skylight, the new high-performance skylight of steel and 858 panes of clear, high-efficiency glass protects the landmark building while brightening the Great Hall interiors with 50 percent more natural daylight than before.

With a new skylight solution in place, the architectural team directed the methodical removal of paint layers to reveal the original coloration of the ornate plaster work. By restoring Union Station’s original color scheme and stabilizing the skylight, visitors now enjoy the authentic experience intended in the 1920s.

Prior to the restoration project, the Great Hall did not offer travelers an uplifting experience as they waited for their train. From a lighting standpoint, the discolored skylight panels and heavy paint schemes combined with outdated and non-dimmable induction light fixtures created a very gloomy, dark, uninspired space.

The ultimate lighting solution would need to provide a balance and harmony with an abundant source of filtered, natural sunlight during the day. Since the feature element of the Great Hall is the skylight, the artificial lighting needed to play a supportive role, not distracting or drawing attention away from the skylight’s architectural presence. Various mockups throughout the design process worked with samples of the restored paint colors, a range of skylight panels with various degrees of opacity and reflection, along with large scale lighting installations to understand how the designed lighting would support and enhance the direction of the architectural team.

With advancements in LED technology, the team was able to work with new lower profile fixtures. High performance, asymmetric led cove lights were installed on the existing second-floor ledge that wraps around the Great Hall to provide the general lighting. Mockups were critical to make sure the fixtures were concealed almost entirely from the visitors view while still providing the distribution required. The results call attention to the volume of the space and intricate plaster detailing, not the fixtures.

Location: Chicago, Illinois

Lighting Design: CharterSIlls

Architect: Wheeler Kearns Architects

Client: Private

When Wheeler Kearns Architects was commissioned to design this private residence in Chicago, they sought out a lighting design collaborator that had the experience to accentuate the modernist cantilevering structure, engage the landscape and museum quality art, while simultaneously creating a warm and inviting home. The illumination of key architectural figures and surfaces, tested with extensive full scale mockups and combined with a flexible control system, balances programmatic pragmatics and drama to underscore the variety of moments within the home and exterior gardens.

Location: Nanjing, China

Lighting Design: CharterSIlls

Architect: Perkins + Will

Client: Chervon Holdings LTD.

Lighting is used to reinforce transparency and provide architectural definition. Interior surfaces are evenly illuminated to produce a glow when one views the building from the exterior. In addition, the warmer color quality of the interior lighting evokes a human, more intimate feel. The large “floating” roof, punctuated with several openings, allows abundant natural light to permeate during the day . In the evening it serves as an ideal canvas to uplight, giving the building a dramatic sense of height.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s historic Unity Temple is famous for its striking skylight and unconventional construction, being one of the first poured-in-place concrete buildings in the country. Built in 1908 and made a National Historic Landmark in 1971, it underwent a $25 million restoration from 2014 to 2017. In addition to interior and exterior lighting upgrades, the original light fixtures were shipped out and repaired, and theatrical lighting was added. The 8,000 sq ft architectural masterpiece now stands just as magnificent as it did over 100 years ago.