Urs Hirschberg is professor for the representation of architecture and new media at Graz University of Technology and the founding director of TU Graz’ 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 the 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.

In his research he explores ways in which creative collaboration and the use of new media can enhance architectural design and production and augment our built environment. One main focus of his team at IAM is architectural geometry and digital fabrication. IAM master level design studios have a tradition of designing and building digitally fabricated 1:1 projects. Recent research projects include “Nonstandard Architecture” and “Augmented Parametrics”, both funded by FWF, the Austrian Science Foundation.

An active contributor to the field of Computer Aided Architectural Design in research, Urs Hirschberg has published in Journals and edited resp. contributed to several books. He is a founding editor of GAM, the Graz Architecture Magazine, an internationally distributed peer-reviewed bilingual magazine about architectural research. 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 Architectural Research European Network Association and a founding editor of AJAR, the ARENA Journal of Architectural Research.