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The New Nordic Restaurant: Culinary Manifesto and Architectural Concept

As part of the New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics, and Place exhibition, join this panel discussion to hear renowned architects of restaurants Noma and Under discuss the intersections of art, architecture, design, and craft.

The National Nordic Museum's new exhibition, New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics, and Place, connects gastronomy with architecture. Cuisine becomes a site-specific practice, grounded in location, ingredients, and technique. The exhibition,organised by Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, shows how closely the New Nordic Manifesto parallels Nordic architects who create site-specific architecture based on the plot and landscape. Rather than letting a global building industry make every place look identical, they seek to craft something unique and meaningful driven by the specific site.

This panel discussion features two renowned architects, Kai-Uwe Bergmann of Bjarke Ingels Group, and Aaron Dorf of Snøhetta, as they discuss the intersections of art, architecture, design, and craft. The panel will be moderated by Kim Clements of JAS Design Build.

Photo: Timon Koch / cinemarine.no

This talk is part of "New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place"

New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place
November 15, 2025 - March 8, 2026

Food is more than nutrition – it is culture, identity and history. Discover how a new Nordic food movement has sparked interest in local ingredients and natural materials across borders and artistic disciplines.

Photo Credit: Photo: Frode Larsen / The National Museum, Norway
Explore the Exhibition

Speakers

Kai-Uwe Bergmann, FAIA

Partner, Bjarke Ingels Group
Bio

Kai-Uwe Bergmann, FAIA

Partner, Bjarke Ingels Group

Kai-Uwe Bergmann, FAIA 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 40 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 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 constructed with a completion date in 2026. Further projects include Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge, Brooklyn Queens Park, Smithsonian Master Plan, Pittsburgh Master Plan and Miami Beach Square. He complements his professional work through previous teaching assignments at Georgia Tech, University of Pennsylvania, IE University in Madrid, and his alma mater the University of Virginia. Kai-Uwe formerly was on the Board of the Van Alen Institute, participates on numerous international juries and lectures globally on the works of BIG.
Aaron Dorf

Director, Snøhetta
Bio

Aaron Dorf

Director, Snøhetta

Aaron Dorf joined Snøhetta in its fledgling New York office in 2007, shortly after the Library of Alexandria was completed, and immediately went to work on the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion in New York, a project for which Snøhetta had recently won a design competition.

He says that joining Snøhetta right out of college and working on such an intense and politically involved project gave him an ideal entry into the company, with the youthful exuberance and incredible self-confidence that won the design competition and continues to energise the company.

“Although we were an established company by this point, when I arrived in New York in 2007 we were a group of just seven or eight people. Because of rapid growth, at unexpected times or places, we have a tremendous startup, do-it-yourself mentality that has never gone away,” Dorf says. “That’s really the birth of this company. It has always been multinational and multidisciplinary: made up of architects, landscape architects, interior architects and, more recently, graphic and product design. We are a multidisciplinary design agency with a worldwide presence,” he says.

Far from the “makeshift group” he first worked with, Snøhetta now employs more than 350 people in 40 countries, with teams spread across nine regional studios in Oslo, New York, San Francisco, Innsbruck, Paris, Adelaide, Melbourne, Hong Kong and Shenzhen.
Kim Clements

Creative Director & Co-Owner, JAS Design-Build
Bio

Kim Clements

Creative Director & Co-Owner, JAS Design-Build

Kimberly Clements, creative director and co-owner, founded JAS Design-Build in September of 1992 with her husband Joseph Schneider.

Kim’s connection to the design-build world started in architecture and design school. In her role at JAS, Kim is able to continue developing a passion for homes and how we live in them while exploring just how beauty and creativity can live alongside reality and functionality.

Kim brings a unique blend of style and livability to the spaces she creates, looking for patterns that reflect the essence of a client’s life & interests. This intuitive ability is visible in her balanced and innovative design approach & completed projects. Her collaborative leadership and support throughout the design-build process ensures the forward momentum of the team & their project. Her mission as creative director is to guide the JAS Design-Build community to excel beyond the ordinary and push the design-build model to a truly unique place.

Joe & Kim with their design sensibilities and experience set the tone for work at JAS Design-Build by drawing on an admiration for tradition & craft but also a delight in innovation. It is her commitment to creating comfort within a space which helps define an important aesthetic value at JAS Design-Build. Her understanding of the hopes, needs and intricacies of daily life allows her to guide the design team in their ability to exceed their client’s expectations. The result, that ‘just-right’ feeling, can be felt in the homes of countless JAS Design-Build clients.

As a designer who embraces a builders sensibility, Kim’s tenacity and ‘say it like it is’ nature offers a contagious enthusiasm for finding the possibilities inherent in each project. This is a unique aspect of design-build as practiced at JAS She values a warm expressive home, a meal made from scratch, laughter, a great story, and uses the tools of design-build to celebrate just such things in her work.