Other significant buildings to stem from Lauritzen’s drawing board include Folkets Hus (now known as Vega, a concert venue), the Shellhuset building and the Danish embassy in Washington. Both Radiohuset and the earliest version of Kastrup Airport are listed today and considered peerless modernist monuments.
Throughout his life, Vilhelm Lauritzen had two firmly held beliefs, firstly that architecture is applied art and secondly, that there is ‘no life without aesthetics’.
Vilhelm Lauritzen mastered both daylight and artificial lighting, consistently involving daylight in his architectural projects with large south- and west-facing windows which provided warm sunlight that merged with the cooler light from windows facing north and east. Lauritzen’s light fixtures are based on the same idea, combining directed light with a gentle, more diffuse illumination that softens and shades the rooms.
The first light fixture Vilhelm Lauritzen designed was the Universal pendant, created in 1926–29 for Fritzsches Glashandel. And this was just the beginning. Being a true functionalist, Vilhelm Lauritzen dedicated his entire life to continuing to develop and improve his light fixtures.
The fixtures Lauritzen designed for Radiohuset were introduced to Louis Poulsen’s product line in the middle of the 1940s. In the 1950s, around the same time as Lauritzen’s major construction assignments progressed, more of his light fixtures were introduced to the collection.
