Hubert Klumpner

Klumpner is also the founder and design principal, of the international, Swiss based architecture and planning studio, urbanthinktank_next (uttnext), established in 2019, with a partner office in Medellin (COL). As co-founder of Urban-Think Tank (U-TT), he is regarded as one of the originators of the “social turn”, a movement that had its breakthrough in 2010 in New York with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition "Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement”, curated by Andres Lepik. The 2021 Vienna Biennale for Change under the directorship of Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, where Klumpner curated Architecture and Urban Design, the Forbes Magazine wrote: "The exhibition may therefore ultimately be most productive as a clearinghouse for evaluating which tools – practical and metaphorical – will be needed to change the planetary mindset."

In 2011 Urban-Think Tank Architects LLC was opened in Zurich and blended from 2011 until 2019 with the University Research and Teaching. In 2019, after Klumpner ended the partnership with Alfredo Brillembourg, Klumpner re-founded Urban-Think Tank, Hubert Klumpner Architects LLC, under the label of Urban-Think Tank Next (uttnext).

Klumpner is a tenured professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), where he directs since 2010 the Chair of Architecture and Urban Design. He is the general director of the Center for Architecture, Society and Environment, ETH CASE (Wohnforum). In the Institute of Science Technology and Policy (ISTP) he directs a research group that explores how science, technology and policy are transforming urbanization processes.

Klumpner was associate professor of architecture and planning at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University, New York from 2007 to 2010.

They first came to public attention at the 4th International Architecture Symposium, ARCHISYMP in Pontresina, Switzerland, only the day before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Engaging in direct discourse with Winy Maas, Saskia Sassen, and Sergio Benvenuto moderated by Kristin Feireiss at the peak of the star-architecture cult, their talk was titled, "The Cities Poor Belt: dialectics of poverty and nobility," in what architecture theorist and historian Bart Lootsma, present in the auditorium, remembers as follows: "But when architects like Thom Mayne, Wolf Prix, and Hani Rashid could not fly in on September 11th because of the grounding of all flights, you two presented us a radically alternative program for architecture, based on inclusivity, not exclusivity, and collaboration instead of individualism." In 2002 the collaboration resulted in the NGO Caracas Urban-Think Tank.

Klumpner founded together with Alfredo Brillembourg the garage project Caracas-Think Tank in 1998. U-TT is a group of architects who are actively engaged in working with the other 90% of people affected by urbanization processes. From the perspective of the global south, resilience, risk, in Post-apartheid, Post-crisis, or Post-conflict conditions.

Later in 1995, he received a Fulbright Fellowship to study at GSAPP at Columbia University / NY, a postgraduate degree as Master of Science in Architecture and Urban-Design (MSAUD), winning the Award for Excellence in Design. After extensive traveling in the Americas, he decided to stay in South America until the 2010 call to join ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

Klumpner has a lifelong engagement with learning and teaching architecture. Appointments starting out directly after his graduation in February 1993 as the assistant in the Masterclass to Hans Hollein at the Academy of Applied Arts Vienna. In the Methods course with Luis Fornéz he introduced Digital Technologies at the Architecture Department of the Universidad Central de Venezuela Caracas. Short time teaching activities and lecturing led him to Harvard GSD, SCI-Arc, Taliesin, RIBA, A-A London, TU-Delft, Berlage, HKU, AEDES, Hafen-City University Hamburg, TU-Munich, TU-Vienna, amongst others.

After graduating from a technical high school (HTL), where he passed an apprenticeship as a carpenter, bricklayer, and draftsman with distinctions, he moved to Vienna in 1987 to apply to the academy of art at the Masterclass of Pritzker Prize-winning Arch. Hans Hollein. In February 1993, Klumpner earned his Master's degree in Architecture from the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna and made internships with Enrique Miralles and Carmen Pinós in Barcelona or a self-initiated exhibition and -film project, John Lautner, Architect, Los Angeles.

Hubert Klumpner (born 22 December 1965 in Salzburg) is an Austrian, architect, urbanist, educator, researcher, curator and activist.

Hubert Klumpner was born 22 Dec.1965 in Salzburg, Austria where his family moved shortly before his birth, as the third child of Karl-Heinz Klumpner, a customs officer, and Lydia Klumpner (born Bayer) from Germany. Klumpner's parental grandparents are from a Moravian-Silesian family of architects, builders, and mining entrepreneurs (Karl Klumpner, Moritz Klumpner, Emanuel Klumpner, Leopold Klumpner) from Fulnek (CZE), where they lived for generations before the flight and expulsion after WWII.