Lighting designer David Burya has a unique philosophy and process — one that could be extremely helpful in residential technology integration
Aug. 20, 2024 - One of the first questions David Burya asks his clients is:
“Where is a place you have been that you never wanted to leave?”
Burya, the design principal and chief strategy officer for Tirschwell & Co. Architectural Lighting Design, explains what happens next.
“In the 10 seconds after that — this is what I need to know — peoples’ minds are awash with memories of places and people and stimuli that are rich with desire,” he says. “In a way, we are creating future memories by designing toward impeccable desires. People come to us to design their dream home; why would we not start with their dreams?”
“And this is not about light.”
What Burya’s driving at is something that architects, designers, and technology integrators understand: A space or a system is much more than imported marble or high-end audio gear. It’s the intuitive skill of combining all those elements to create a truly human experience.
Understanding the Process
Light — sunlight, moonlight, starlight, firelight — existed long before humans considered it a “design element.” From whale oil lamps to LEDs, designed light has only been a recent addition to the long timeline of human existence. It's crucial, however, to remember that all light is natural, though we now harness and produce it through advanced technology. Given this history, it's no surprise that light can evoke a wide array of emotional responses and invoke memories. This is something Burya genuinely believes and understands.
"A client might share, ‘One of my core memories is sitting on the beach by a campfire, feeling the warmth on my face and body while my back remains cold,’” says Burya. “This sparks further questions: Is there a specific smell? A taste? What other elements are tied to that memory? Why separate those design elements when they can all work together to create a cohesive experience?”
“We then consider ways to turn these idyllic memories and desires into reality,” Burya continues. He explains that the process they use to create the desired result isn’t about fixtures or keypads so much as it is the more elemental human relationship of living with light. “Understanding and expressing light is our gift to design,” he says. “This is especially challenging when you realize that light is invisible.
“You need to understand what it will do when you release it.”
The Smart Home
What Burya is driving at can also be applied to other aspects of a true home technology integration: a holistic experience that’s more than the sum of its parts.
“What David is expressing is something we’ve long believed: that there’s something truly transformative that can happen when the right design professionals are working in concert with our integrators,” says JoAnn Arcenal, Crestron’s director of business development. “For example: It’s one thing to have distributed audio — the potential to have music anywhere in the home — but it’s quite another to have a home that understands what music one might like when, precisely where, and at what volume.”
To have that perfect aural element — being enveloped in J.S. Bach or John Coltrane as lighting, shading, climate, and more all turn a home into a truly personalized refuge — is yet another part of something that can become utterly transcendent. “David has put into words what the discovery process should yield: a space that is so finely tuned to an individual or a family that they feel as if it is reciprocal to their desire — and they never want to leave.”
Practical Applications
To put all this into concrete terms — to get those concepts into practical applications — Burya explains to his clients that he’s not so much a designer as a confidant. “I told one client that I first needed to gain his trust,” he says. “And once that occurred, I learned the light he really desired was cinematic — even film noir. He wanted to create the light that he reminisced about from the films Citizen Kane and La Dolce Vita. The design challenge was to develop a way to express the personalities of all the acts or performances of the movies while being intuitive.”
“Considering the range of possibilities in the lighting design — and the need to set each scene like a director — we developed a custom rotary keypad allowing for 16 presets to be selected simply by turning the knob, something made possible by properly implementing Crestron and DMX technology,” Burya explains. “It was a completely custom creation that ostensibly appeared as an old-school rotary dimmer made from oil-rubbed bronze, and when it was finished, it had precisely the connection he’d sought between the desired environments and intuitive operation; you turn the knob and watch the room come to life.”
The control element was key, as Burya notes: “An engraved 16-button keypad could handle the same function, but at the cost of frustrating the client instead of responding to the client.” It speaks to Burya’s core tenets. “Design is the distiller by which technology becomes an intuitive liberator. Often, I hear the client requesting simplicity while simultaneously holding an iPhone. The expression, ‘Keep it simple, stupid,’ ultimately ends with stupid and gets at the heart of the problem.”
Telling a Story in Light
Burya recalls another installation in which a client wanted to highlight an original Picasso — a sculpture of incalculable value. “He wanted to only light the sculpture — nothing else,” Burya says. “By carefully masking bits and pieces of the light emanating from four projectors, we were able to illuminate the artwork and nothing else: Not the pedestal, not the floor, not the walls nearby.
“Designers need a real renaissance approach. The designer must deliver the art by understanding the science.”
Creating precisely these types of one-of-a-kind solutions is something that every home technology professional recognizes, especially those who work with clients at the highest end of the economic spectrum. And the uniqueness of each solution informs another aspect of Burya’s — and Tirschwell’s — process: “One of our core aspirational values is to never repeat our previous successes. Replication and repetition have high value in engineering — let’s just not call that design. Each client has a story we need to tell in light.”
A Deeper Understanding
JoAnn Arcenal agrees. “Our most successful integrators are our most inventive,” she says. The home automation industry has always had the “heart of a hacker” — like Burya, who will take apart a fixture to rework it for a solution, the individuals who wanted to learn how to calibrate television sets for a given environment had to take the things apart and noodle with the TV’s guts. That fundamental drive can translate into an understanding of the need for individual customizations — there’s no simple bag of tricks; there’s a drive to make the machine fit its user, no matter what.
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