By Brent Protzman, Director of Product Management at Lutron Electronics
The way we design and use commercial real estate has undergone a fundamental shift. Spaces that were once almost exclusively cubicles and private offices must now adapt to hybrid work models, evolving technology, sustainability mandates, and heightened occupant expectations.
Looking forward, the buildings that will attract the most desirable, long-term tenants will be designed not just for today’s identified needs, but for tomorrow’s unknowns. Along with HVAC, power distribution, and network connectivity, lighting systems form the operational backbone of modern commercial buildings, directly impacting how spaces function, how occupants feel, and the overall efficiency of building operations.
Flexibility as an Imperative
Commercial building layouts change frequently. Conference rooms become collaboration zones. Private offices convert to open workspaces. Temporary teams need dedicated command centers that are eventually reabsorbed into the general workspace. With traditional wired lighting, the wiring defines how the lighting can be controlled. It’s not flexible, and changes to the designed lighting zones are expensive, disruptive, and often virtually impossible.
Wireless lighting control solutions fundamentally alter this equation. When each light fixture is individually addressable, lighting can be easily grouped, regrouped, and reassigned. When a tenant needs to reorganize the floor plan, addressable controls allow facility managers to reconfigure zones in minutes through familiar mobile interfaces—no electrician is required, no walls are opened, and there is less disruption to employees.
Depending on the selected control system, a wireless, granular protocol can also accommodate diverse lighting types across a single platform—tunable white for wellness-focused areas, full-spectrum control where color rendering is most important, and standard lighting for circulation spaces—all within a single control platform. The result is a building that can optimize performance in key areas without compromising the design intent. When your design plans or budgets change, you don’t have to redesign your control system; simply reprogram your existing one.
Image: Smart, wireless solutions like Lutron’s Vive and Athena systems make it easy to reconfigure and transform lighting on the fly and from anywhere, with a convenient app.
Daylight as a Design Challenge and Strategic Asset
For lighting designers and architects, daylight presents both opportunities and challenges. Views and natural light consistently rank among the most valued office amenities, yet daylight glare and heat are also responsible for frequent employee complaints. Manual shades are a low-cost, but ineffective solution – too often they get lowered once to block glare and are seldom raised again, eliminating the daylight benefits they were meant to preserve.
Automated shading paired with intelligent controls offers precision rather than compromise. Shades adjust based on time of day or daylight conditions in the space, allowing them to automatically harvest daylight while minimizing disruptive glare, offering seamless, comfortable daylight control, rather than relying on manual adjustments by a busy facilities team.
The most significant gains result from integrated shade and light control. When daylight sensors detect sufficient natural light, electric lighting dims or turns off automatically to save energy and maintain appropriate lumen levels. The Market Research Future projects the automated shading system market will more than double from $20.59 billion in 2024 to $41.66 billion by 2032, driven largely by building owners recognizing that effective daylight management delivers both operational efficiency and competitive differentiation for tenants who prioritize occupant comfort as a means of attracting and retaining top-tier employees – their most valuable resource.
Automated shading at BlackRock maintains a comfortable space while preserving city views and maximizing daylight. Image: © Eric Laignel, courtesy Lutron
In BlackRock’s Manhattan headquarters, where the global investment firm recently consolidated 4,000 employees into a single, one-million-square-foot space in New York City’s Hudson Yards development, lighting control was a key design driver from conception. Their approach—“democratizing daylight”—ensures employees throughout the space, whether in perimeter or interior zones, benefit from natural light that feels authentic and changes naturally throughout the day.
In concert with tunable white lighting that complements natural light cycles, automated shades on all windows adjust gently and quietly to preserve city views while eliminating glare. “Bringing in daylight and allowing that daylight to penetrate all the way deep into the floors so that everyone has access to natural light was very important,” explains Barry Novick, Technology Strategy at BlackRock.
Wellness in the Workplace
Everyone wants to work in a space that embraces daylight; that feels like an indoor-outdoor environment. Research demonstrates that dynamic, optimized lighting—cooler, energizing color temperatures in the morning hours, and warmer as the day winds down—feels more natural and less fatiguing, and is often associated with enhanced employee productivity, job satisfaction, and retention.
The rising popularity of green building certifications, such as the WELL Building Standard, reflects this reality, and earning certification typically requires robust lighting and shading systems. Automated solutions significantly increase the achievable points compared to manual alternatives. The systems you specify today will shape occupant experiences for decades to come.
Infrastructure That Supports Evolution
The fundamental challenge facing commercial buildings today isn’t predicting the future—it’s building systems that can adapt to whatever that future holds. Properly conceived and implemented lighting control infrastructure provides exactly this capability. Wireless connectivity eliminates fixed wiring constraints. Addressable control facilitates reconfiguration. Integrated daylight management delivers both energy efficiency and occupant comfort. Cloud connectivity enables continuous improvement through software updates and learning algorithms.
For lighting designers, architects, and engineers specifying systems today, the question isn’t whether to treat lighting as infrastructure. The question is how to design integrated platforms that deliver measurable performance now while maintaining the flexibility to evolve as buildings, occupants, and requirements change over time. The buildings that thrive in the next decade will be those that build this adaptability into their foundation from day one.
About the Author:
Brent Protzman, Ph.D., is the Director of Product Management for Commercial Shades at Lutron Electronics where he focuses on expanding the use of smart shading to improve building comfort and sustainability. His education and expertise contribute to a unique understanding of the interactions between human-centric design, operational efficiency, and sustainability.
Brent earned his Ph.D. in Architectural Engineering from the University of Nebraska and is a former professor of Building Systems at the University of Colorado. He has served on numerous industry boards, including the wireless mesh networking protocol Thread, the Light Concept advisory of the WELL Building Standard, and the Attachment Energy Ratings Council (AERC).
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