Hirschberg Urs Leonhard

Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Arch. Dr.sc.ETH

Professor of Architectural Representation and New Media at Graz University of Technology in Graz, Austria, Urs Hirschberg is founding Director of the Institute of Architecture and Media (IAM). Having served as Dean of the TU Graz faculty of architecture from 2004 to 2013, he is currently Director of the TU Graz Field of Expertise ‘Sustainable Systems’, one of the five fields of cross-disciplinary research that define this university’s research profile.

Urs Hirschberg received his diploma in Architecture and his doctoral degree from ETH Zurich. After holding positions as research assistant and lecturer at ETH Zurich and as assistant professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design he became a full professor at the faculty of architecture of Graz University of Technology in 2002.

His main research interest is Augmented Architecture: exploring the ways in which creative collaboration and the use of new media can enhance architectural design and production and augment our built environment. He has worked extensively on the potentials of creative collaboration via networks in design, experimenting with web-based online environments in his teaching. His institute also has a strong research record in architectural geometry and digital fabrication. He is a founding editor of GAM, the Graz Architecture Magazine, an internationally distributed peer-reviewed bilingual magazine about architectural research.

An active contributor to the field of Computer Aided Architectural Design in research, he has published in Journals and edited resp. contributed to several books. From 2009 until 2013 he served on the Council of EAAE, the European Association for Architectural Education, of which he was president from 2012-13. He is a founding member of ARENA the European Architectural Research Network and a founding editor of AJAR, the ARENA Journal of Architectural Research.

In 2020 Birkhauser published the Atlas of Digital Architecture, a compendious work about methods, tools, concepts and phenomena of architecture in the digital age. Urs Hirschberg initiated the project in which two dozen university professors and lecturers share their vast range of expertise. With Ludger Hovestadt and Oliver Fritz he is one of the contributing editors. (see video about the Atlas)