DESIGNER SPOTLIGHT
In the corridors of the Danish Radio House, small circular lamps sat beside the studio doors. Green meant the studio was free. Red meant a broadcast was live and the door stayed shut. The architect who designed those signal lamps also designed the building around them, along with its door handles, its furniture, and nearly every fixture that lit it.
That architect was Vilhelm Lauritzen, and the lamps he drew for his buildings in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s are still in production at Louis Poulsen today. Five families carry his initials in the catalogue: the VL45, the VL38, the VL Studio, the VL Ring Crown, and the VL 56. This is the story of the buildings they came from.
The Architect Who Drew Everything
Lauritzen was born in Slagelse in 1894, graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture in 1921, and opened his own practice in 1922. The firm he founded is still working today. Its early landmarks include the 1939 Copenhagen Airport terminal, considered significant enough that it now carries his name, and the Radio House in Frederiksberg, inaugurated in 1945 as headquarters of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.
His conviction was that architecture is applied art for the people, never a privilege for the few. In practice that meant designing from the inside out, down to the smallest object a hand or an eye would land on. The Radio House is preserved today as a listed building and now houses the Royal Danish Academy of Music, with Lauritzen's lamps still hanging where he placed them.
VL45 Radiohus: The Pendant From the Radio House
Lauritzen designed the VL45 in the late 1930s for the Radio House project, working with Louis Poulsen from the start. It was first known simply as the Office Lamp, and after the war it began appearing in Louis Poulsen's own catalogues. The shade is a glossy, three-layer, mouth-blown glass bell finished with untreated brass, which darkens gradually as the metal ages.
The three layers of glass give the shade an even glow across its whole surface, with direct light through the opening below, so the pendant lights the table and flatters the faces around it at the same time. The 6.9" size works in pairs or threes over a kitchen island, while the 9.8" size can anchor a table on its own. There is also a rechargeable portable version that carries the same glass from the dinner table to the porch rail.
VL38: The One That Bends
The VL38 came out of the same Radio House commission in the late 1930s, and it is the one built for close range: a soft, curving shade on a slim stem, with an adjustable head that tilts to aim the beam. The shade is painted white on the inside to keep the downward light warm and clean. Louis Poulsen returned it to production in 2016, added a black version the following year, and fitted the family with LED.
The VL38 is made today as a table lamp, a floor lamp, and a wall lamp. The floor version beside a reading chair is the classic placement, with the shade tilted so the pool of light lands on the page and the room around it stays dim. In a bedroom, the wall version frees the nightstand entirely and angles down for reading without waking anyone.
VL Studio: The Signal Lamp, Reborn
The VL Studio is the lamp from the opening of this story. Designed in 1941, the small circular fixture sat outside the Radio House studios and glowed green or red depending on whether a recording was in progress. In 2022, Louis Poulsen brought the form back as a table, floor, and wall lamp with triple-layered opal glass and lightly brushed brass.
The reissue turns a piece of broadcast infrastructure into a lamp that fits almost anywhere in a home. The table and floor version comes in 5.9", 9.8", and 12.6" sizes: the compact one suits a bookshelf or windowsill, the larger two hold their own on a console or sideboard. The wall version puts the same soft, glare-free circle of light in hallways and stair landings, the places you pass through after dark.
VL Ring Crown: The Chandelier That Waited
In 1945, Lauritzen designed a ring-shaped chandelier for the Radio House, its opal glass shades held in a crown of polished brass. The original ring chandelier never found its place in the building. The drawings outlived the commission, and in 2019 Louis Poulsen revived the design as the VL Ring Crown series, with mouth-blown, triple-layered opal glass on untreated brass.
In 2025 the series grew again, with table and floor versions joining the wall lamps, eighty years after the first drawings. The polished brass catches evening light the way candlesticks do, and the table version suits a credenza, an entry console, or a nightstand, where the opal shade glows without glare at close range.
VL 56: The Lamp Still Hanging at Vega
A decade after the Radio House, Lauritzen designed Folkets Hus in Vesterbro, Copenhagen, a house for the Danish labour movement that opened in 1956. True to form, he drew everything in the building, from doorknobs and staircases to power outlets, furniture, and lamps. The building lives on as the concert hall Vega, and the VL 56 Pendant he designed for it still hangs above the wood-panelled bar beside the hall.
Louis Poulsen reintroduced the VL 56 in 2023 in high lustre chrome and polished brass. It is the glamorous one in the family, a rounded metallic pendant that mirrors its room, and it belongs over a bar cart, a kitchen island, or a round dining table, anywhere its reflections have movement and colour to catch.
What Holds the VL Family Together
Run through the five families and the same thinking surfaces every time. The VL45 wraps its bulb in three layers of hand-blown glass so the light arrives soft and even. The VL38 puts an adjustable shade at reading height. The VL Studio started life as a corridor signal and now lights bookshelves and hallways, and the Ring Crown and VL 56 pair opal glass with polished metal for the rooms where people gather.
Every one of them was drawn for a public building, an airport terminal, a broadcast house, a workers' hall, by a practice that treated architecture as applied art for the people. For a wider view of the designers who shaped this tradition, our guide to Scandinavian lighting puts Lauritzen's work alongside his contemporaries.
In a home, the VL lamps keep doing the jobs they were drawn for: the VL45 over the table you eat at every night, the VL38 beside the chair you actually read in, the VL Studio glowing in the hallway you pass through last before bed. Explore the full Louis Poulsen collection to see the VL family alongside the rest of the catalogue.
If you are planning lighting for a whole room or a whole build, our in-house design team works with clients across Canada on everything from a single fixture decision to a full lighting plan.
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