Kai-Uwe Bergmann is a partner at Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), which has offices in New York, New York, and Copenhagen, Denmark. This group of architects, designers, builders and thinkers operates within the fields of architecture, urbanism, research and development.

Bergmann brings his expertise to proposals around the globe, including work in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Bergmann heads up the firm’s business development, which currently has the office working in 20 different countries, and oversees the firm’s communications.

Registered as an architect in the United States (eight states) and Canada (one province), Bergmann most recently contributed to the resiliency plan BIG U to protect 10 miles of Manhattan’s coastline. He complements his professional work through previous teaching assignments at University of Pennsylvania, University of Florida, IE University in Madrid and his alma mater, the University of Virginia. Bergmann also serves on the Board of the Van Alen Institute, participates on numerous international juries and lectures globally on the works of BIG.

The firm’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes, not least due to the influence of multicultural exchange, global economic flows and communication technologies that together require new ways of architectural and urban organization. Like a form of programmatic alchemy, BIG creates architecture by mixing conventional ingredients, such as living, leisure, working, parking and shopping. By hitting the fertile overlap between pragmatism and utopia, BIG finds the freedom to change the surface of the planet to better fit contemporary life forms.

Recently completed projects include the Danish Maritime Museum (2014), Superkilen Park (2013), Gammel Hellerup Multi-Use Hall (2012), Danish Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo (2010) and The 8 House (2010). BIG was recently distinguished with a National AIA Honor Award, Wall Street Journal’s Innovator of the Year Prize, and Architizer’s Firm of the Year Award. Work in North America includes buildings in New York City, Miami, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Washington D.C. West 57th Street, an 80,000-square-meter, mixed-use ‘courtscraper’ and BIG’s inaugural project in the United States, is currently under construction and slated for completion in 2015. The new LEGO Experience Center in Billund, Denmark and then Waste-to-Energy plant doubling as a ski-slope recently broke ground in Denmark to be completed by 2017.

Bergmann will present a lecture at 5 p.m. Friday, April 29, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville, as part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design lecture series.

In his lecture, titled “Hot to Cold," Bergmann will take the audience through the scorching heat of the Arabian Desert to the unforgiving chill of the Finnish tundra, on a journey across the globe to explore the forces that shape cities and buildings. Traveling from the hottest to the coldest parts of the planet, BIG explores how design solutions are shaped by their cultural and climatic contexts to unlock the immense possibilities of adaptive architecture. The central challenge is to mitigate the climatic extremes for hospitable human life, while finding solutions that can be both economically and environmentally profitable. “Hot to Cold" is a search for a pragmatic utopia, shaped as the kind of world we wish to inhabit.

This is the Zweig Group Leadership in Design Lecture.

This lecture qualifies for AIA Continuing Education System learning units.