Illuminated River

Illuminated River lights nine central London bridges along 3.2 miles of the Thames, the world's longest public art commission. Artist Leo Villareal's LED sequences move slowly across each bridge, drawn from the river and its light, with the architecture and heritage of every bridge kept in view. Custom fittings carry blades that keep light off the water, cutting light spill and energy use compared with the lighting they replaced. As architectural designer I reconstructed the bridges from LiDAR scans into 1:1 3D models, then allocated and placed the LED fixtures on them, so the architects in London had an exact location for every light. Phase one (2019) lit London, Cannon Street, Southwark and Millennium bridges; phase two (2021) added Blackfriars, Waterloo, the Golden Jubilee footbridges, Westminster and Lambeth. The view starts high over the city and flies down the river at night, straight through Tower Bridge and every lit bridge to Lambeth, past each bridge's fixture drawings: an Environment Agency LiDAR scan of the Thames corridor, with the bridge models set on their mapped positions and deck heights.

Client: Illuminated River Foundation · London
Discipline: Architecture
Role: Architectural designer · LiDAR-to-3D bridge reconstruction · LED fixture allocation and placement
Artist: Leo Villareal
Bridges: 9 · Lambeth to London Bridge
Site model: EA LiDAR 2020 point cloud · OpenStreetMap
Bridge models: 1:1 Rhino master model, BNG / ODN, with the fixture layout
Length: 3.2 miles · 5.1 km
Phase two: ~4,000 light fittings · 15 km of cabling
Opened: 2019 · 2021

Open the interactive 3D view

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