Guest Speaker - Kai-Uwe Bergmann - FORMGIVING: Giving Form to the Future
Event Description
Formgiving—the Danish word for design—means to give form to that which has not yet been given form. In other words: to give form to the world that we would like to find ourselves living in the future. A task more important than ever, as humans are the greatest force shaping the planet today. To feel that we have license to imagine a future different from today—all we have to do is look back ten years, a hundred years, a thousand years—to realize how radically different things were then than now. The same would be true if we could look forward with the same clear sight. Since we know from our past that our future is bound to be different from our present, rather than waiting for it to happen on its own we have the power to give it form.
Speaker
Kai-Uwe Bergmann, FAIA, Partner, BIG
Moderator: Segene Park, AIA, AIA Japan Chapter Representative, AIA International
CES: Estimated 1 LU/HSW for AIA Members
Photo by Flemming Leitorp
Kai-Uwe Bergmann is a Partner at BIG who brings his architectural expertise to proposals around the globe, including work in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Kai-Uwe heads up BIG’s business development--which currently has the office working in over 35 different countries. He also oversees BIG’s Urban scales projects and supports BIG’s Landscape projects. He is registered as an architect in the USA (15 states) and Canada. Kai-Uwe most recently contributed to the Reimaging Brooklyn Bridge competition as well as the resiliency plan BIG U to protect 10 miles of Manhattan’s coastline. First envisioned through the Rebuild by Design competition to develop proactive responses to Superstorm Sandy, it is now being further developed and the first 2.5 miles will be completed in 2026. Further projects include Brooklyn Queens Park, Smithsonian Master Plan, Pittsburgh Master Plan, Miami Beach Square and Zira Island Master Plan. He complements his professional work through previous teaching assignments at Pratt Institute, UPENN his alma mater the University of Virginia and lecturing globally.
BIG is a Copenhagen, New York, London, Barcelona and Shenzhen based group of architects, designers, urbanists, landscape professionals, interior and product designers, researchers and inventors. The office is currently involved in a large number of projects throughout Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes. Not least due to the influence from multicultural exchange, global economic flows and communication technologies that all together require new ways of architectural and urban organization. We believe that in order to deal with today’s challenges, architecture can profitably move into a field that has been largely unexplored. A pragmatic utopian architecture that steers clear of the petrifying pragmatism of boring boxes and the naïve utopian ideas of digital formalism. Like a form of programmatic alchemy, we create architecture by mixing conventional ingredients such as living, leisure, working, parking and shopping. By hitting the fertile overlap between pragmatic and utopia, we architects once again find the freedom to change the surface of our planet, to better fit contemporary life forms.
Moderator: Segene Park is a Board Member of AIA International and chair of 2022 AIA International Spring Conference; AIA Japan Immediate Past President, Chair of Honorary Fellow Council, Strategic & Accreditation Committee, and Design Awards.
He was born in Seoul, Korea in 1973. He served the Defense Security Agency (DSA) Korea as a chief’s private assistant from 1998 to 2001, where he received the 2001 Excellence of Duty Award. After he was discharged from the DSA, he gained a bachelor's degree in architecture at University of Illinois at Chicago.
Segene joined the Annex 5 in Epstein as a project designer in 2003. The Annex 5 was Epstein's in-house architectural design studio dedicated to providing an architecturally sensitive clientele with a socially focused sense of design. His creativity and punctuality contributed to the team success; his designs brought the numerous awards and were published in Architectural Record, New York Times Online Edition, AIA Magazine, and other publications.
In 2007 he joined Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (SOM), Chicago, a global architectural, urban planning and engineering firm. His work extended to overseas projects on diverse scales. One of the remarkable works was his 354m-tower in Russia; it was exhibited in Venice Biennale in 2008 and introduced as a new form of Russian modern architecture of that time.
After marriage and relocation to Tokyo, Japan his interest in design further expanded into urban planning. He entered the department of Urban Design and Planning in Nikken Sekkei, Japan’s biggest and global design firm of around 3,000 employees, in 2015. There soon he started to lead Nikken’s urban planning team, continuing to win three major international architecture/masterplan competitions. Those projects were also published in ArchDaily and other major publications in Russia. In 2020 his team was again awarded with the Urban Awards for Best Comfort Class Complex for another architecture/urban planning project in Moscow.
So far, he has been involved with different kinds of worldwide projects on all scales: architectural designs for residential building, office, hotel, museum, convention center, high-rise building, super tall building, and sustainable building, landscape design and urban planning. In addition, Segene became a president of AIA Japan (AIAJ) in 2021 after serving over four years with AIAJ as a board member, secretary, and vice-president. He has been a member of the Cliff Dwellers (CD) in Chicago since 2005 and served as the CD Arts Foundation committee member in 2008 – 2012. The CD Arts Foundation’s mission is to support the arts by providing arts-oriented organizations and individuals with grants, by helping present performances at the Club, and by sponsoring an annual music competition. He was also a member of the Chicago Architectural Club in 2006 and the Lions Club International, Seoul, Korea in 1995.
Recently Segene was featured as one of the key speakers for United Nations High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, and the panelist for YLG Forum during ULI Asia Pacific Summit.
