Philip Ursprung

Philip Ursprung is professor of art and architectural history at ETH Zürich.

Ursprung earned his PhD in art history at Freie Universität Berlin in 1993 after studying in Geneva, Vienna, and Berlin. He has taught at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin, Columbia University, Barcelona Institute of Architecture, Cornell University, and University of Zürich. From 2017 to 2019, he served as dean of architecture of the ETH.

His research explores 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 editor of Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History (Lars Müller Publishers, 2002) and co-editor of Gordon Matta-Clark: An Archival Sourcebook (University of California Press, 2022); and author of Die Kunst der Gegenwart: 1960 bis heute (Beck, 2010), Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art (University of California Press, 2013), Der Wert der Oberfläche (gta Verlag, 2017) and Joseph Beuys: Kunst Kapital Revolution (C.H. Beck Verlag, 2021).