Futurecity led the bid submission for an architectural competition with American artist, Leo Villareal in 2016. The brief asked for ‘ideas to transform the capital with a unified kinetic light installation across Central London’s bridges that would connect, celebrate and capture the spirit of the Thames and its diverse communities’.

The competition attracted 105 submissions from around the globe; the winning proposal (selected by an interdisciplinary panel) was from a collaborative team including Futurecity, FuturePace and American artist Leo Villareal, who impressed the jury with his ambition to create site-specific, lighting proposals for each individual bridge and the ambition to connect all 15 installations into one largescale, undulating, connected, kinetic-artwork.

Artist Leo Villareal’s answer was to unify the bridges and the north and south banks of the river, and join them as a single large-scale, undulating, connected, kinetic artwork. Each bridge has a custom authoring platform to create sequenced patterns. The patterns – abstract, organic, and gently kinetic – take inspiration from the natural and social activities of the river. The resulting artwork engages specifically with each bridge, respecting and revealing its own distinct history, while connecting the four together into a single, coherent whole.

To achieve the site-specific artwork, Villareal and his team collaborated with London-based architectural firm Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands designing the system. In selecting the lighting fixtures most suitable for each bridge, Villareal considered many factors, including the surrounding ecosystems, the needs of local inhabitants, and the architectural character of the bridges.