Mark Szulgit

Mark Szulgit is an architect (SAR/MSA) from NY- his preferred building medium, frozen water. Educated at University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, he specialized in arid climate-appropriate desert architecture. While working in Stockholm, Mark made a split second decision (literally) the 26th of January 1997 to leave the Stockholm office world of architecture after reading a newspaper article about the Icehotel in Jukkasjarvi, Sweden.

Mark has worked intimately with ice for 12 years, in both design and production. He is fascinated by the plastic nature of ice and snow, both in an artistic and structural sense and boasts it to be an ideal material for model making scale 1 to1.  He continually rants about ice and snow as a legitimate, respectable building material despite the admonishment of his architecture colleagues; he will gladly talk your ear off defending his viewpoint. He has lectured at several universities and institutions - including Australia, Austria, Guatemala, Hungary, Norway, Sweden, and the USA. Mark was the architect of the world’s first permanent indoor Icebar/Icegallery in Stockholm 2000 and co-founder of the Dutch based ice stage design company Solid Water. He participated in building the world’s largest igloo (23m high) in the Italian Alps in 2008 which is still used to date. When he left his full-time position at Icehotel, Mark was the Artist Coordinator and the chief designer/project manager for Absolut Icebar International. He now works freelance.