Our guest of today, Philip Ursprung, is a teacher and researcher at the ETH in Zurich, where he has been the Dean of the department of architecture during the period between 2017 and 2019.
Besides that, he has been teaching and lecturing in the most prestigious Academies of Europe and of the United States, the country he was born in, in the early sixties.
He has studied Art history, History and German Literature, and probably due to this, he has developed an intellectual, phenomenology referential with architecture. In his work, History is not approached as an academic narrative, but as an experimental task. And research is not carried out as a conventional scholar method, but rather as an open and creative process. To formalize this experience, he crosses possibilities and approximations towards an evolution of the theory and does not treat the theory itself as such.
He crosses Architecture and Art, and Nature assumes the major role in the equation of reason and creation of things, “blurring boundaries”. One could say that history, theory and the subjects, are raw materials to be used for a conceptual practice which aims at attaining something, culturally and ecologically relevant and influential.
In his own words: “I look for places of transformation”, so memory and manifesto emerge in his work with the proper balance and the adjusted trace, to open wide possibilities of thought and action.
I had contact with the work of Philip Ursprung in 2005, when I came into contact with his work “Natural History”, the beautiful catalogue of the Canadian Centre, exhibition of Herzog & de Meuron, “Archaeology of the Mind”. The exhibition our today´s guest curated and edited in such a brilliant and exquisite way proposes an original and performing alternative (maybe the only one possible, I dare to say) to “ Herozg & de Meuron – une exposition” at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, curated at the time by the conceptual artist Remy Zaug, which I had the privilege of testifying (part of) the revolutionary process and the glorious opening in 1995, exactly 10 years before the CCA event.
In 2017, Philip was awarded the prestigious Swiss grand award for art, the Merit Oppenheim Prize. Not only due to this, but due to everything else already mentioned, it is a real honour to have you as a guest professor in our seminar of the E profile of the FAUP PHD program. Thank you very much.
Nuno Brandão Costa, 2021