Fundamental Explorations: BIG's Kai-Uwe Bergmann on Business Development, Starting from Scratch, and Patience
By Julia Gamolina
Kai-Uwe Bergmann, FAIA, is a partner at BIG and brings his expertise to proposals around the world, including work in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Kai-Uwe heads BIG's business development, in which the office is currently active in over 40 different countries. He also oversees BIG's urban development projects and supports BIG Landscape. Registered as an architect in the United States (thirteen states) and Canada. He earned his Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, and his Masters of Architecture at University of California, Los Angeles. In his conversation with Julia Gamolina, Kai-Uwe talks about building myriad skills for a foundation in architecture, and exploration, advising those just starting their careers the virtues of patience and to realize the cumulative nature of early jobs.
JG: How did your interest in architecture first develop?
KUB: I can certainly go straight to the Legos in my childhood that had a profound effect — taking a finite number of pieces of bricks and creating with them an infinite number of worlds and visions. I would literally spend most weekends and any time off from school building all kinds of worlds. There was always a desire to do things creatively. My mother is a potter, a ceramicist. She had this real love for making things with her hands. She would come every week and bring things out of the ovens and the kilns and would show off the work. I learned a lot of that from my mom. That was then coupled with the traveling that my family did.
My mother traveled in her youth and she felt that was a really important part of my development. I was born in Germany, and then my family and I moved to the United States. We resided in Georgia until I finished highschool, and thereafter I went to college at UVA, and then UCLA. But we would go back and forth between the United States and Europe often, and once took a trip where we visited forty out of the fifty states. That kind of being out and meeting people and seeing things in real life really offered me, with the combination of Legos, a more abstract creative process to a more experiencing these incredible pieces of architecture and spaces and cities.
Kai-Uwe Bergmann with colleagues. Image by Flemming Leitorp.
Kai-Uwe with BIG NYC 2018
How did you decide to go to UVA, and then to UCLA for graduate school?
I was doing my own research about what schools or colleges to attend, already knowing I had wanted to study architecture. I spent my junior year travelling up and down the east coast visiting a lot of universities, and became set on the University of Virginia. It’s America’s first public university designed and built by Thomas Jefferson, with the Rotunda and the lawn. I felt that there, I truly got a grounding in space and how to think about space. I was also interested in the humanities - in writing and in history. The beauty of UVA is that it offers so many classes and so many different departments, that I really was going into every department and trying to learn a bit here and a bit there.
Then I made a decision at UVA to go directly into graduate school, because this was in the early 90s and the economy was in a recession. I ended up going through a two-year Masters program in Los Angeles. I really set forth to again take that omnivorous appetite to study. I took classes in a lot of different fields from theater set design to film making to art courses to again sort of complement the architecture.
How did you then get your start in the field?
Once I finished my studies, I felt like I had learned little in six years beyond designing and building models in cardboard. So, in the first two years after my studies, I apprenticed in stone masonry and carpentry. I worked with adobe in West Africa, and learned glassblowing in the forests of southern Sweden. I wanted to expose myself again through travel into different perspectives. How do you build things? How do you make things? It was once again about my mom instilling in me knowing how to make things, not just draw them. All that was complemented with travels in Siberia and a couple of other places.
That led to my first job that I was paid for, which was in the atelier of the glass artist Dale Chihuly. I moved to Seattle and worked in his atelier for three years. He had always done glass installations, but he had yet to take them to the architectural scale. I was the first architect that he ever hired to help him bring his installations to a technical proficiency to be installed at the scale of buildings and large spaces. That was exciting because we grew his atelier from about forty people to about one hundred and sixty people making things, installing them all over the world.
“You mentor by your actions...Every single day, how you act, how you relate to people, and how you make decisions is really important.”
When did you start in professional practice?
When I realized that I’m an architect at heart and I wouldn’t be a glass art installer for the rest of my life [laughs]. So, I took a break and traveled around the world for a year. I focused on what would be next, and for me, that was finding an architecture job. At the ripe young age of 26-27, I got my first architecture job, which was also in Seattle, with Ed Weinstein and Lee Copeland. I was with them for three years.
How did you finally get to BIG?
I was interested again in reconnecting with Europe, so I went back with a backpack and my portfolio - I had about a thousand dollars - and spent three months looking for work, ending up at Baumschlager Eberle Architects in Austria. I worked there for two years, and then decided to move north to Denmark specifically. I met Bjarke at the Venice Biennale and told him that I had decided to move north. He just said, “Come on over!” I ended up joining BIG a year later, back in 2006.
How did the focus on business development come about for you?
Survival instincts [laughs]. When I worked previously at Chihuly’s, he was an artist that was really creating the field of studio glass art. It did not exist. So, he very much had to create narratives about why it should be taken seriously as an art movement. From him I learned a tremendous amount about how to communicate. He had a wonderful saying, where he said, “You need to have a camera, a slide projector, and a telephone.” The camera was there to take photos of the work because then the work could be shared with hundreds. The slide projector was there to communicate those images to thousands. And then the telephone is there to reach out and put out the word and to even more people.
As I worked at Weinstein + Copeland’s or at Baumschlager Eberle, I was always looking at ways to help them enter new markets. I remember asking Ed Weinstein, “Why don't we work in Canada? It’s only an hour away.” The same attitude went with me to BIG. When I arrived, BIG had one CV, which was Bjarke’s. It was in Danish. We had someone’s relative as our financial accountant that did the books. I was thinking about that and realized that if we were to start working internationally, we needed to professionalize. I worked as an architect for the first three years I was there, but then I also realized there was a need to look for work more strategically and that it wasn’t always going to just walk through the door. That process has never stopped. I’m still learning, I’m still doing things for the first time, and it’s been a real exciting journey.
Throughout all of this, who mentored you?
Dale Chihuly believed in me at a very tender age. He had not worked with an architect before, but he saw a certain potential in what I could do. He provided me with responsibilities and trust. When I interviewed with him, he asked, “What is the most important attribute that anyone could have?” I said, “Curiosity,” and that really struck a chord with him because he knew that with curiosity, you’ll always be learning. He wanted that in the people that he was going to surround himself and the studio with.
If I were going to go beyond Dale, I would say my mom, in many ways, has been a mentor in never questioning but always supporting my thoughts and thinking. She was always the biggest cheerleader along the way, which of course a parent should be, but I think it takes a certain special someone that can perhaps take themselves out of their own kind of attitudes and values and what they would be doing in a certain circumstance and support someone else’s vision.
Those two have made me who I am. Everything that has come after that has been very much built through my interactions with them.
Kai-Uwe with Mama Renate Bergmann 2019
Kai-Uwe with Dale Chihuly 2002
In turn, who do you mentor and how do you mentor?
You mentor by your actions. I have a really close and personal relationship to my team, in both the business development and communications departments. Another close department is landscape and being close to a group that is really thinking about the public realm. Every single day, how you act, how you relate to people, and how you make decisions is really important.
Switching gears from mentorship but in a similar vein, you recently became a father! Tell me about parenthood and how it ties into your professional priorities.
First off, fatherhood is a dream. Many people have told me throughout my life that being a parent is one of the most fulfilling things one can do, and I have to agree. It’s a life affirming experience. That being said, I have to admit that pre-Covid, I was one of the BIGsters that probably spent most of the time on the road, anywhere from 100-120 days a year. So the biggest lesson in these last fifteen months has been to halt all movement and be here with my daughter Amelie and my wife Michelle. You see this openness for learning that exists and the kind of building that is happening every single day. You think about the young woman that she will become. You try every day to add a little bit to that being. It’s truly one of the most amazing experiences.
How do you manage competing priorities when it comes to architecture and fatherhood?
I do feel that BIG is a family and for me, before my own child, BIG has always been a place that I have felt offers the same curiosity and learning through the people that are there. It offers the same life affirmation. I come to work and I wouldn’t even call it work, it’s more of a lifestyle. I’d come to BIG every single day and it’s about what the promise is or what the potential is in each one of us.
Trying to find purpose in what we do and trying to bring all of those varying challenges that exist every single day into something that makes you want to get up and do something about it. For me, there isn’t a work life and then a home life. I do approach this as a single life mission to, through what one would call work and what one would call the home, to do and work on things that are the biggest challenges of our lifetime and to make incremental steps and leave the world a better place then we discovered it.
“...my experience is through the lens of an immigrant. I have started my life four times...You start from scratch every single time in terms of your network or your financial foundation and such. It also creates this sixth sense of resolve and confidence.”
Touching on challenges, what have personally been some of the biggest challenges for you in your career?
Again, my experience is through the lens of an immigrant. I have started my life four times.
I cannot tell you how much I relate to that. Me too.
You start from scratch every single time in terms of your network or your financial foundation and such. It also creates this sixth sense of resolve and confidence. Once you have done it a couple of times, you don't get scared easily about starting from scratch again. If I had to start from scratch today, I would. I’m not worried about what has been or what is.
I think about BIG, which was a single office of thirty people. We all sat together. Since then we have grown and we have started new offices in New York, London, Barcelona, and Shenzhen. Each one of those iterations and offices was very much like starting from scratch. Each one has similar challenges but also unique ones that are based on their local conditions. So that has been a continual professional challenge but also very exciting each and every time.
Also, when one is alive for a certain amount of time, you live through things like a pandemic, or a recession, or a climate catastrophe…these things don’t just happen once. I have lived through multiple economic crises in the USA, Covid, and also Sandy was a pretty big hit to us as we were just starting out here in New York as our very building flooded. Those are the sort of daily frictions that occur again and again, but you have to remember that all of these things offer you new insights and new ways of working, and they bring us together again on a more humane level in many ways. Even though we are not physically together in these days of Covid, I feel closer to the BIGsters all over the world. We are all going through this together.
In terms of addressing challenges, what do you do personally do to help advance women in the profession? What would you advise other male peers to do?
As a man, you should be able to relate to the issues women face — everyone has a mother, and if you’re lucky, you have a daughter or a sister — so you should be concerned if there are not equal rights and opportunities for women. I’m openly shocked that men do not remember their mothers or their potential daughters when they act or have, in the past, made egregious attempts of not having women be equal partners or respect them. That is something I am very concerned about for Amelie and for her future.
I do feel that BIG is a place for women to excel in the professional space. I know that it is not reflective currently within the partnership, but if one were to actually expand the lens to include associates, directors, and the expanded leadership of BIG, then I think we have a much fuller view of everyone that has participated in making BIG...well BIG. In that fuller picture, when I say that — because the future partners are coming directly out of the directors and associates — I feel that with time, the partnership will also be more reflective of everyone at BIG. I work every single day with amazing architects, designers, and administrators that are women, and that’s something that I support very much and in some cases mentor — just as women have played a very important role in my life in informing my identity and values.
Kai-Uwe Bergmann with his wife, Michelle Espejo-Bergmann.
Amelie Espejo Bergmann on the day she was born March 4th, 2019
I have interviewed some of those women at, and that have come from, BIG – Sheela, Daria, Iben – and they are some of the most talented women in the industry. Who are some other people in the industry that you admire?
MASS Design Group engages with a lot of very important issues both in their locality and also globally and they are doing so within a new model of engagement as a non-profit, and I find that very inspiring. It can also be a very small office like that of my friends Johanna Hurme and Sasa Radulovic named 5468796 Architecture, that is based in Winnipeg where they are both immigrants, one from Finland and the other from Serbia. They are doing a body of work that is very local but has global aspirations and global interests. So, I admire a mix of people that I’m very close to, and those that I respect from afar.
What is some of the best advice you have gotten? What advice do you have for those just starting their careers in the industry?
A professor of mine at UVA, John Ruseau, said, “The three greatest things about college are June, July and August.” What he meant by that is that never again will you have the opportunity as you do in your summer vacations to experience things without having the responsibilities of work or a family.
“...have patience and explore. Things will always change, they will always turn. Then those explorations may very well be the founding facts that you need for a given project in architecture.”
After my second year of architecture school, I couldn’t get an internship and I was all moody about it. All my professors said, “Julia, enjoy it, you will never have a summer like this again. Read and draw.” I did and it was wonderful, and I recognize how fortunate I was, from a financial perspective, to do that.
That is exactly what I would say to people, especially young people starting out in their career. Have patience. Right now things may look really dire and grim, but actually like you and like I, this time out offers them a chance to really go and explore. You don’t have to travel to explore. You can explore in your own armchair. You can explore by trying out different things. And it’s important to keep your synapses and your creativity going.
Also learn what patience means because it is not about your getting your first job. Your first job could actually be something as sweeping the halls of a glass factory floor or delivering food to senior citizens – each experience could suddenly teach you about what a glass factory needs or what it means to grow older and how we as architects need to accommodate everyone in any setting.
That experience is helpful! It's all cumulative, right?
I’m actually referring to my first jobs! Because you know, in that recessionary period, I did a lot of odd jobs and each one I learned something new about myself and about how to deal with clients and how to deal with the different aspects that you need in work. I would say, have patience and explore. Things will always change, they will always turn. Then those explorations may very well be the founding facts that you need for a given project in architecture.