Milwaukee Tool - Red Beacon

As project partners in the renovation of Milwaukee Tool’s downtown office building, the exterior lighting goal was to create a “Red Beacon” in the skyline. The design showcased three main feature walls that anchored the building and its visibility from both the city streets and the main elevated highway. These textural walls are an expression of the company’s culture of many pieces coming together to create the whole. To reinforce this idea through lighting, a continuous linear graze highlights the varying texture of the wall while also unifying the indi­vidual panels together. This was extensively studied through computer renderings and lighting calculations using real life fixture photometry. The comparison between the computer calculated rendered image and the finished installation is strikingly similar.