A fascination with robots ultimately sparked Jakob Lange’s interest in architecture. “I realized that in robotics you focus on specific areas, the sensors or movement for example, and what I wanted was to create complete projects,” recalls the partner at Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), which has offices in Copenhagen, London, Barcelona, and New York. “My strength has always been in my conceptual thinking. I have this tendency to like solving the more complex problems and coming up with solutions that engineers would not come up with.”
With that in mind, Lange, a native of Odense, Denmark, studied architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, eventually pursuing an internship at PLOT, the now defunct architectural practice cofounded by Ingels before he established BIG. “It was my awareness of and interest in the details of architecture, things like window frames, that left me with one hand in the product design part of our office and the other in architecture,” Lange explains
At BIG, Lange oversees BIG Ideas, the firm’s tech-fueled product division first hatched as a way to deepen synergy between the structures that the firm builds and its interiors. Consider the Tirpitz Pendant, introduced in 2017 in collaboration with Danish lighting manufacturer Louis Poulsen for BIG’s transformation of a World War II-era bunker into the stripped-down Tirpitz Museum in Blåvand, Denmark. Refining that industrial-style fixture and exploring “the essence of light” further, Lange points out, BIG and Louis Poulsen unveiled the Keglen lamp series this year. Fashioned from spun aluminum, the four pendants stand out for openings that generate ambient light upward, as well as the gently curved, droplet-like glass inserts, or “bubbles of light” as Lange describes them, nestled under conical shades.
Other recent BIG launches include the digitally powered, unobtrusive Friday Lock from Friday Home (billed as the world’s smallest smart lock) and the playful, modular Voxel sofa for Danish furniture brand Common Seating that calls to mind video games. “It almost looks like small pixels of cushions that are stacked together,” says Lange.
Originally conceived as a pair of industrial pendants for a museum in Denmark, the Keglen series evokes the look of galvanized steel and is available in different cone heights and sizes
This article originally appeared in HD’s 2020 Product Marketplace issue.
