Strutting Their Stuff

With lighting fixtures slowly becoming the domain of the Integrator, there’s already so much to be excited about. But this October at CEDIA in Dallas I was introduced to the most clever fixture design I’ve seen so far. While individual fixtures creep forward with modest technical and aesthetic innovations, the Strut reimagines how lighting can be laid out in the room.

Quite simply it’s a channel that can be recessed, surface mounted, or suspended in almost any configuration and serves as an attachment point for a variety of fixtures that range from subtle cove-style strips to hanging pendants. What’s more is that you can run the lighting fixtures independently as opposed to grouping everything that’s installed as a single lighting load.

Let’s say, for example, you had a few rows of Struts in a kitchen - a room where I think they’d be particularly useful due to the number of simultaneous lighting layers required. A Strut that runs across the island might have a few hanging pendants, a few small down-lights, and even a moving track head or two to wash some nearby art. All of these lamp types can be grouped and operated independently even though they’re all installed in the same Strut.

Sounds cool, but what does this mean?

Quite simply it means raising the bar for how well we can light rooms from day one and through years of changing use.

When starting from a blank canvas, whether it’s a new-build or an existing room that’s under-lit, we’ve usually been limited to a pretty basic toolbox. We can throw some squares and circles up and maybe hang a pendant or two. In a rare instance we might even employ a sconce. But these lights often land on an arbitrary grid and we have to hope that they offer the coverage and quality we’ll need to make the space livable and beautiful.

The Strut, however, is more like a Lego system with near infinite little pieces you can plug in. You can change the location, type, intensity, quantity, and grouping of the fixtures you install. This means the room will be better lit on day one and that it will continue to adapt as the space becomes familiar and changes with time.

I can’t wait to start installing this solution and educating architects, designers, and clients on this new product. I’ll post some images in the Gallery so you can see a few of the interesting fixtures and I’d urge you to poke around the website for a full taste of just how flexible this piece is!

Onwards!