Up close with Danish Architect Jakob Lange

Lange’s home with wife and daughter is an apartment in a converted school located just off Istegade. It’s a street being overcome by creeping gentrification, heroin to hipster, you might say.

Lange says that a few years ago BIG had the opportunity to buy the school. The firm’s partners revised the interior, creating themselves compact, bright and airy apartments. It’s the lounge room wall artwork that my eye settles on. The architect has applied an artwork of his own devising, constructed from layers of packing tape, it depicts BIG’s awardwinning “mountain” housing under construction. “Three layers, two layers, one layer – it was like one dollar on tape and 100 hours of mantime,” he laughs.

Where does he find the time, I muse? As one of BIG’s architectural wunderkind, Lange’s fingers are in pies all over the world. He’s project leader of the remarkable Tallinn Town Hall, in Estonia, and has projects on the go in Stockholm, Taiwan and in Denmark. The urban design concept for the winning Stockholmsporten Masterplan – a new “entrance portal” into Stockholm – includes a “reflective, self-sustaining hovering sphere” that will produce enough energy to keep it floating while supplying 235 houses with electricity. I can’t even imagine how that got dreamed up, but looking at BIG’s portfolio, you could say that its “now” seems about a decade ahead of everyone else’s.

I ask Lange about his approach to architecture in Copenhagen, a city with a long architectural history. Prince Charles would be appalled, but Lange finds looking for contrast more interesting than trying to blend in. “If there’s a pattern then don’t repeat it; if there’s a colour, use something else. You’re not building something that was made 100 years ago, you’re doing a modern piece and it should reflect the current time.”