The Lighthouse lantern and tower has the capability to express its own unique appearance or fully coordinate with other game-day effects and presentations. Photo: New England Patriots/David Sarnevitz
The Gillette Stadium Lighthouse serves as a beacon for the North End renovation project
No team has dominated the National Football League more in the 2000s than the New England Patriots. From 2002 to 2019, the Patriots made nine appearances in the Super Bowl and emerged victorious six times. If General George S. Patton was accurate in stating that “America loves a winner,” then “Americas Team” resides in Foxborough, MA, not Dallas.
For Patriots fans, the excitement of the 2023 season extended beyond the play on the field, as the Kraft family and Gillette Stadium unveiled the completion of the $250 million North End renovation project, which was designed to reinvigorate the stadium’s appearance and enhance the gameday experience for fans. The project included the installation of the largest outdoor curved-radius videoboard at a sports venue in the country, the G-P Atrium (a new 50,000-sq ft function space overlooking the field) and a reimagined Enel Plaza.
But it’s calling card just may be the Gillette Stadium Lighthouse, a 22-story structure with a 360-deg observation deck that offers panoramic views extending to the Boston and Providence skylines. When Gillette Stadium opened in 2002, a bridge and Lighthouse were designed into the architecture to honor New England’s coastal history. Gillette Stadium’s newly renovated Lighthouse is more experiential and has been incorporated into Patriots and New England Revolution Major League Soccer games by serving as a focal point for celebratory moments and other aspects of the game-day experience.
“The previous Lighthouse was part of the original stadium design when Gillette Stadium opened…and was architectural in nature only,” explained Jen Ferron, chief marketing officer at Kraft Sports + Entertainment. “The new Lighthouse is much more an architectural expression and interpretation of an actual lighthouse, with a glowing lantern top and observation deck. Programmable, color-changing fixtures with dynamic content capabilities were used within the lantern as well as on the exterior of the Lighthouse tower to blend game-day dynamic effects with architectural lighting, anchoring the Lighthouse as a visual beacon of the North End renovation project.”
The lighting plan for the project was designed not only for the Lighthouse structure, but also to work in conjunction with the remodeled Enel Plaza. There were several components to the lighting strategy including directionally targeted light poles, landscape lighting, canopy illumination, perforated pylons, bridge and seat wall lighting as well as Lighthouse trellis and cupola illumination.
The lighting design was created to enhance and amplify the grandeur of the Lighthouse itself and the space around it, said Jamie Perry, principal at architectural lighting design company Lam Partners. “At 218-ft tall, the Lighthouse is a prominent part of Gillette Stadium’s North End architecture. To ensure that the Lighthouse had depth and visual interest, a blue-steel trellis representative of the original stadium design, runs vertically up both the east and west sides of the Lighthouse. Attached to the blue-steel trellis are LED light strips that can be programmed to change colors. The Lighthouse’s programmable LED fixtures within the lantern and behind vertical architectural details create fully customizable, dynamic lighting effects and low-resolution video content, bringing the Lighthouse to life and becoming an extension to other stadium video boards and effects.”
The lighting system specific to the Lighthouse is unique in that it allows for “scenes” to be programmed and displayed across the façade, such as fireworks, fireballs and sweeping lights reminiscent of a lighthouse, among others. Dynamic RGB fixtures allow for color changing as well as movement, motion, patterns and designs. The lighting design requires intentionality to decide when and how it should interact on days in which there are no events at Gillette Stadium. While the renovation was completed prior to the New England Patriots’ first regular season home game in September 2023, Perry said that the team is still exploring how best to program the fully customized lighting components for maximum effectiveness during different times of day and on special occasions.
Architectural lighting on the exterior of the Lighthouse was created to accentuate the verticality of the new structure. Illumination of lobby spaces within the Lighthouse is subdued to support a sense of hospitality while not competing with exterior lighting. All of the lighting components together can be programmed to create an immersive and theatrical experience for guests.
Installation included its challenges, one being that the busy stadium event schedule made it difficult to plan for consecutive installation dates. The scale of the Lighthouse also required lifts that could reach the top and navigate the 360-deg structure. The design of the Lighthouse’s angled cupola resulted in some very narrow spaces between interior and exterior walls, necessitating a targeted approach to installing the lighting fixtures.
Installing the fixtures behind the blue-steel ladders and within the Lighthouse lanterns proved to be tricky due to the limited space within each of those details. Careful and extensive coordination efforts between the lighting designer, manufacturer, architect and contractor were required to ensure the lighting design worked with the project schedule, the sequence of construction on site, difficult to access locations, and the intended performance and appearance of the overall project design.
The older static structure can’t compete with its modern evolution; the current Lighthouse lantern and tower can express its own unique appearance or fully coordinate with other game-day effects and presentations within the stadium, which gives the ownership group flexibility on how the Lighthouse can be programmed and operated. The project team worked with ownership and the gameday operations team to ensure that the dynamic content controller for the Lighthouse and dynamic accent lighting can be controlled together from a command center, minimizing the complication of multiple control protocols and methodologies.
“Since opening the experiential Lighthouse in early October [2023], we’ve seen a consistent flow of guests coming to visit,” said Ferron. “We are open to the public year-round but closed to the public on days when we have stadium ticketed events. On ticketed event days, the Lighthouse is used by the event owner for members or groups to access at their discretion. We have hosted private cocktail receptions inside the Lantern Room at the top of the Lighthouse. And at Patriots games, the ‘Keeper of the Light’ rings a ceremonial fog bell to kick off the game from atop the Lighthouse.”
With more than 160 lighthouses dotting New England’s coastline, Gillette Stadium continues to honor the region’s maritime history with its Lighthouse upgrades while evolving the guest experience, proving that it game plans its lighting nearly as well as the home team hangs championship banners.