CannonDesign Lighting Studio projects recognized with multiple national and regional IES awards

The following projects all received a Section Award of Merit in the Illumination Award for Interior Lighting Design category:

• Medical College of Wisconsin, Center for Cancer Discovery
• Rady Children’s Health, Southwest Tower
• Northwestern Medicine, Faculty Office Center

The IES National Awards recognize meritorious contributions to lighting design. The Interior Lighting Design category “recognizes exceptional interior lighting projects that balance the functional illumination of space with the artistic application of light to enhance the occupant’s experience.”

Learn more about the lighting features of these nationally recognized projects:

Medical College of Wisconsin, Center for Cancer Discovery

The five-story, 161,000-sf cancer research building transforms the college's existing cancer platform into a global center of cancer research excellence. Innovative lighting design enhances both research productivity and user comfort.  

Starting in the multi-story entrance lobby, there is a harmonious blend of natural daylight and electrical lighting, carefully adjusted to provide ideal levels of brightness and contrast. Other lighting solutions throughout are tailored to support activities from precision oncology to structural biology, ensuring optimal visibility and flexibility throughout the facility.

For example, the circulation between the research labs and collaborations spaces is consistently lit with indirect coves for ease in wayfinding and allowing the research and collaboration to be on display. Multi-height collaboration hub perceives as theatrical atrium with dark ceiling and a playful pendant installation that evokes an atmosphere of discovery and innovation.

Rady Children’s Health, Southwest Tower

A celebration of playfulness, curiosity, and healing, this nine-story 300,000-sf pediatric outpatient tower brings together multiple specialty services under one roof. The tower features vibrant colors, immersive graphics and biophilic touches. 

The goal was to spark imagination, encourage learning about various health topics and create interactive experiences that made a visit to the doctor less intimidating. The tower aims to be a place where pediatric patients can heal and learn simultaneously and where specialty physicians can collaborate more readily. This was strengthened through extensive collaboration between experiential graphics and lighting, interactive moments, and carefully coordinated lighting details throughout.

Coves winding through public spaces illuminating the space indirectly. Bendable tape light in niches create interactive vignettes where children can rest and play. A bubble motif is punctuating clinical corridors, using large round downlights in clinical corridors, in tandem with perimeter coves for soft ambient light.

Northwestern Medicine, Faculty Office Center

Northwestern Medicine’s Faculty Office Center is a forward-thinking alternative to traditional physician offices: an elegant, high-performance environment seamlessly integrated into the hospital, designed to support both focus and restoration while keeping physicians close to patient care. 

 Amenity spaces elevate the experience beyond a typical workplace, offering meditation rooms, showers, and café-style hospitality supported by a lighting design rooted in hospitality design. The original concept of a fully luminous ceiling evolved into a very cost-effective solution using perforated panels, a frosted transmissive material, and economical 2×2 flat panels suspended just below overhead equipment.

Perimeter slots graze vertical walls in enclosed huddle rooms, creating a softly illuminated backdrop from multiple vantage points throughout the space, while reflective decorative pendants animate the café. In respite rooms, color-changing grazers wash fabric curtains, allowing individuals to select light color that suits their mood and need for recovery.

CannonDesign projects were also recognized with section awards at the IES Boston Chapter awards:

• California Department of General Services, Gregory Bateson Building
• St. John’s University, St. Vincent Health Sciences Center
• Caltech, Resnick Sustainability Center
• Rady Children’s Health, Southwest Tower
• Northwestern Medicine, Faculty Office Center

CannonDesign’s award-winning Lighting Studio is uniquely positioned as a team of in-house specialists that seamlessly engages with design teams. The studio ensures that lighting is not a background design element or afterthought, but rather a design tool that amplifies a space.