Christoph Kumpusch

Christoph a. Kumpusch is a New York-based architect and Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia GSAPP, where he directs the Extraction Laboratory and teaches design and visual studies.

Kumpusch is the director of Forward-slash, a multidisciplinary practice founded in 2008, and the head of Back-slash, the experimental arm of Forward-slash (/), investigating technology and material effects on form and tectonics. It grounds its work in a concentrated research program focused on architectural details and the spawning of new buildings from the smallest parts outward. A theoretical project runs parallel to this work, identifying historical and cultural contexts triggered by detail innovation. The office is both a design and publishing outfit, producing essays, books, exhibitions, installations, podcasts, performances, films, and buildings. Forward Slash strives to be intellectually rigorous, materially sustainable, and socially responsible.

In 2017, Kumpusch founded the Extraction Laboratory, a Columbia GSAPP research laboratory examining architecture derived from situation, rather than place. The lab reboots and redefines research trajectories; it studies architecture and design of ‘extreme’ situations – repositioning these apogees as centralized norms. In the summer of 2017, the lab’s summer workshop was based at the Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, where they designed and built a set of nine roof structures. The 2018 workshop, Dry – Wet, traveled to one of the driest landscapes on earth, the United Arab Emirates, then contrasted with one of the wettest, the Republic of the Maldives.

Kumpusch was a Leonardo da Vinci Fellow and a Rudolf M. Schindler Scholar, MAK Center Architect in Residence, USAA Scholar, National Collegiate Engineering Award-winner and a 2013 and 2015 Graham Foundation Grantee. Kumpusch is co-author of System Wien with Lebbeus Woods, Anthony Vidler and Manuel DeLanda (Hatje Cantz, 2005); editor of IDEA(u)topsy ( / Productions, 2010); IDEA(L) ( / Productions, 2011); Built Ideas (Theoharis David, 2012); Light Pavilion (Lars Müller Publishers, 2013); Urban Hopes – Made in China (Lars Müller Publishers, 2014) and Detail Kultur – If Buildings Had DNA (AADCU, 2016).