Kim Förster

Born 1973 in Lemgo/Germany.

Kim Förster is currently living in Zurich/Switzerland where he works as a writer, researcher and teacher. He holds a PhD in architecture of ETH Zurich with a doctoral thesis on an institutional history of the legendary New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (1967-85), written from the perspective of cultural studies and sociology. Previously, he had studied English language and literature and American studies, geography, and pedagogy at University of Münster/Germany (1995-1996), at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin/Germany (1997-2002), and as an exchange student at the University of Toronto/Canada (1999-2000).

After having completed his teacher training at a secondary school in Berlin (2003-2005), from 2006 to 2009 Kim Förster was staffed as an assistant at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at the ETH Zurich, where he is presently holding a position as lecturer for methods in the doctoral program in History and Theory of Architecture. In the course of his PhD project, he was a visiting researcher at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montréal/Canada and at Columbia University in New York, NY/USA in 2009/2010.

Förster has published in various magazines (ARCH+, Archithese, Candide) and other contexts, i.e. from 2002 to 2007, he was co-editor and on the editorial team of the Berlin-based journal An Architektur. Together with the New York collective common room, he recently edited Arts for Living, with a grant from the Graham Foundation. His dissertation will be published by gta Publishers, ETH Zurich in 2014.