Philip Ursprung is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at ETH Zürich since 2011 and Designated Dean of the Department of Architecture. He earned his PhD in Art History at Freie Universität Berlin in 1993 after studying in Geneva, Vienna and Berlin and his Habilitation at ETH Zurich in 1999. He taught at the University of Geneva, the Hochschule der Künste Berlin, the GSAPP of Columbia University New York, the Barcelona Institute of Architecture and the University of Zürich. 

Philip Ursprung served as advisor to the Swiss Federal Government as member of the Eidgenössische Kunstkommission from 1997 to 2004. He was president of the Fondation Nestlé pour l’Art from 2003 to 2014 and president of the Jury of Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart from 2007-2011. Since 2013 he is president of the scientific board of Zentralinstiut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. 

View more about the Chair for the History of Art and Architecture here.

Research  

Philip Ursprung’s research deals with the history of modern and contemporary art and architecture with a focus on North American art in the 1960s and 1970s and European architecture since the 1980s. He is the editor of Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History (Lars Müller Publishers, 2002) and Caruso St John: Almost Everything (Poligrafa, 2008) and author of Die Kunst der Gegenwart: 1960 bis heute (Beck, 2010) and Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art (University of California Press, 2013). Research projects under his direction, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, include “The Value of the Surface” (2001-2005), “Art & Science” (2008-2013), “Subsidizing of Art in Switzerland” (2010-2014), “Gottfried Semper and the Globalization of Knowledge” (2013-2016), “Yugoslavia in the Cold War” (2013-2016), “Mass Housing ca. 1970” (2014-2017).

View all publications here.