Having trained as a bricklayer in 1919-23,
Mogens Lassen was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine
Arts' School of Architecture, but also trained at a number of
drawing offices with, among others, Danish architect Tyge Hvass in
1925-34.
A trip to Paris in 1927-28 sparked Lassen's
interest in Le Corbusier's ideas about the home as a tool for a
freer lifestyle. Introducing mezzanine floors in high-ceilinged
rooms, for example, offered one way to free the home from the
constraints of habitual thinking.
Applying a similar, experimental approach,
Lassen designed homes where both function as well as the daylight
flooding in through the windows shaped the rooms, and where outdoor
spaces were just as carefully designed as the interiors.
As an architect for "The Permanent Exhibition
of Danish Applied Arts and Industrial Design" in Copenhagen in
1939-67, Mogens Lassen was behind a number of exhibitions whose
style of presentation helped Danish applied art win international
recognition.
In addition to his many projects, villas, high-rise buildings,
sports complexes and shop interiors, he designed furniture,
furnishings and furnishing accessories.
Even if his steel furniture pieces from the
1930s are original examples of the innovations of international
modernism, it is, above all, his pieces of simple, functional
wooden furniture, like his folding Egyptian coffee table, that have
gone on to become furniture classics.
In 1971, Mogens Lassen was awarded the C.F.
Hansen Medal