Kurt Forster

Kurt W. Forster is Visiting Professor, Princeton School of Architecture. He has held professorships at Stanford; M.I.T.; Federal Institute of Technology, ETH, Zurich; and the Bauhaus University Weimar. He also headed the Swiss Institute in Rome, the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, was founding director the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles) and a counsellor to the Senate of Berlin after unification. He has organized major architecture exhibitions, directed the 9th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale (2004), wrote studies on Renaissance architecture and on contemporary photography (Ruff, Chiaramonte, Lambri). He edited the English translation of Aby Warburg’s Writings and published a book on Aby Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft. Ein Blick in die Abgründe der Bilder (Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2018).

Forster is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Accademico di San Luca, a recipient of the Meret Oppenheim Prize (Switzerland), the architecture prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and winner of the Schinkel Prize in 2021 for Friedrich Schinkel. A Meander through his Life and Work (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2018).

Kurt Forster’s Writer page on Drawing Matter