Dr Kim Förster is Senior Lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester and member of the Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARG). He joined Manchester in 2019 after a three years tenure at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, where he served as Associate Director of Research. His research and teaching focusses on knowledge and cultural production, as well as institutional and environmental history, with particular attention to issues of building transition in terms of the social metabolism, practices and policies of energy and material flows, and ways that they are debated and mediated. He is author of “Building Institution” (transcript, 2024) and “Undiciplined Knowing. Writing Architectural History through the Environment” (CCA, 2023), and editor of the open access series “Environmental Histories of Architecture” (CCA, 2022). His current research project investigates the C19, C20 and C21 history of global cement as a modern industrial building material and cheap commodity, offering a corporate critique from perspectives involving cultural studies and environmental humanities. He has published widley on these topics in esteemed international and interdisciplinary contexts, including contributions to publications such as e-flux Index (2024) and e-flux Architecture (2023), “Solarities” (punctum books, 2023), “Beyond Concrete” (Triest, 2022), and Werk, Bauen und Wohnen (2022). Dr Kim Förster holds a German Staatsexamen (equivalent to a Master’s degree) in English and American Studies, Geography, and Pedagogy from Humboldt University in Berlin, as well as a doctorate in Architecture (Dr. sc.) from ETH Zurich.

Cement. Building Material of the Anthropocene

Concerned with multiple disciplinary perspectives, this research project studies the restructuring and impact of a globalizing cement industry at the local and planetary scale – and the profession’s and discipline’s relation towards this kind of extractivism. Moving beyond a celebratory approach to a modernist architectural culture based on concrete, the focus is on how processes of urbanization and the provision of infrastructure in the name of sustainability on the one hand, and continued belief in progress and growth in the name of development and modernization on the other hand, play out globally. Through case studies in both the Global North and South, integrating approaches from architectural history, economic and urban geography, cultural and material anthropology, urban political ecology, to environmental history and humanities, Cement. Building Material of the Anthropocene investigates the environmental impact and the geopolitical disrupture of the current way cement is produced, used, advertised and distributed. Starting from historical research concerned with how the cement industry was nationally syndicalized and internationally expanded, this research project is concerned with the geographies of how cement production became globalized, which in the past called for corporate social responsibility. While Africa is portraited as the next frontier for cement producers, the big players once again divide the global markets anew. China, which in the five years after the 2008 crisis has used up more cement than the US did during the 20^th century, now with its “Belt and Road”-initiative is pushing the frontiers of the urbanization of capital through cement use forward to the next level. In a corporate perspective, new driving forces for cement are seen in the accelerating expansion of infrastructure across the globe, as well as the need for costal fortification and eventually the relocation of megacities. In contrast, the production and use of cement is central in claiming political, national and cultural emancipation while with the withdrawal of the state from the provision of housing and services, the commodification is at the base to raise living standards. Today, as a beginning has been made by a relatively small but influential group of architects and academics to challenge the international cement business precisely because of the life span of the energy embedded in the building material, a comparative analysis of cement production and use is largely unexplored and the careful formulation of a critical perspective in architectural studies, as one of the humanities, based on ethical principles has yet to happen. While the self-proclaimed global market leader, the Swiss-French LafargeHolcim, over the last 15 years has invested in a widespread marketing campaign, encompassing a global awards for sustainable construction, and an international conference series, as well as further greenwashing through corporate funding for academia and culture, the project will develop new perspectives on how to think and act in a global perspective, to decolonialize and decarbonize architectural knowledge, and how to position the research project in a global perspective to strive for social and environmental justice.

Institutional Histories of Education and Culture

For more than a decade, Förster has lectured and published on architectural culture in the postmodern and contemporary era, questions of labour and organization, discursive formations, their conditions and impacts. In the framework of his doctoral dissertation, he focussed on the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies as a paradigmatic case for postmodern discourse and cultural production, especially its four dominant institutional roles as project office, architecture school, cultural space, and publishing house. He analysed the Institute against the background of the profound changes in North-American society and culture throughout the 1970s, the year 1973 with its change in housing policy being a major turning point, as it exploited the opportunities of information and knowledge society after New York City taxation and fiscal crisis in 1975 and the provision of funding for the arts and humanities towards the globalization of architectural debates and the professionalization, if not commercialization of immaterial forms of labour. Since his dissertation, Förster presented various key issues at international conferences and symposia on architecture education, public housing, postmodern media, national and international networks and competitions, e.g. at the conference “Architecture Education Goes Outside Itself,” organized by Joan Ockman, at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014 or in a sessionat the EAHN conference in Torino in 2014, moderated by Léa-Catherine Szacka and Véronique Patteeuw. Moreover, in 2013, he presented and published his research in the context of the “ARCH+ features 19”-event, hosted by the Berlin based architectural magazine ARCH+, titled “On the IAUS and the Networks of Peter Eisenman”. At the CCA, he extended his focus and approach to the criticism of institutional change under neoliberalism. In 2017, Förster curated the exhibition titled „Educating Architects. Four Courses by Kenneth Frampton“ in CCA’s Octagonal Gallery, on curriculum design in the USA in the 1970s and 80s, which took Frampton’s teaching at Columbia University as an example and evidence for the status of the university in society. In 2018, he took part in CCA’s “Find and Tell”-Program, which invites architects and scholars to a one-week residence to select documents to be digitized and shared with a larger public, this time not focussing on the Institute and its performance as an institution, a role which it continuously and consciously refused to accept, but as an architectural project itself. The research will for the moment culminate in a richly illustrated monograph on the Institute in collaboration, with funding by the Graham Foundation.

Histories of Environmental Thought and Practice in Architecture

Applying an institutional, both social and discursive analysis to the topic of the environmental problematic with regard to architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism, Förster started this research in parallel to that on the culturalization, i.e. the aestheticiziation, historicization and semanticization of architecture since the 1970s. First conceived as a postdoctoral project, he has studied different cases of how architecture incorporated and coined approaches to ecology, energy transition and sustainability, analysing political agency in Europe at different spatial scales. The essay, “Umdenken Umschwenken: Environmental Engagement and Swiss Architecture,” presented first as a paper at the conference of European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) on “Greening History: Studying the Environment across Disciplines, Past, Present and Future” in Paris in 2015, which was published in a Routledge Handbook, looks at the intersection of activism and academy, on the case of an ecological exhibition shown at ETH Zurich in 1975, which travelled in all German speaking countries. A second essay “The Green IBA. On a Politics of Renewal, Ecology, and Solidarity,” presented in a session on “Sustainable Cities and Social Justice” at the XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology in 2014, which will appear in Candide 11 in 2019, deals with the forgotten part of the 1984/87 Berlin building expo, discussing the intersection of municipal (bottom-up) politics and urbanism. The current research which focusses on corporate sustainability of the global cement industry, referring to LafargeHolcim’s sustainability awards and their conference series as the case for the intersection of global corporations and architecture, Förster presented at the SAH Annual International Conference in Saint Paul in 2018 and he will continue working on it through literature review, archival work, oral history, and ethnographic research. The intersection of state and market will be approached with regard to the national and European scale through research and teaching. Förster is member of the EAHN "Architecture and the Environment"-interest group and has contributed to “Architecture and the Environment. Field Notes,” edited by Sophie Hochhäusl and Torsten Lange, which was published online as collective writing in Architectural Historiesin 2018. In 2018, he presented at the Petrocultures-conference in Glasgow, how the CCA has made energy transition a topic through exhibiting, collecting and researching projects, arguing that as research institution, beyond being a museum and an archive, it brought together people, objects and stories to rethink architecture’s central role in using and saving energy and resources, proposing alternative strategies for a transition towards renewables.

“Architecture and/for the Environment”

In the position as Associate Director of Research at the CCA from 2016 to 2018,  Förster expanded the both temporal and territorial scope of his own research project on environmental histories by directing a collaborative group research project, funded in the framework of the Architecture, Urbanism and Humanities Initiative of the Mellon Foundation, which focussed on architecture’s complex historical relationship to nature since industrialization. As the effects of man-made climate change become apparent, in this project, which was structured around three workshops/seminars and ran over the course of 18 months, eight researchers, selected in a peer-reviewed process, dealt with unresolved, perhaps irresolvable problems in architecture’s environmental history, while cross-disciplinary attention, including that of architecture, focused on the new realities of the Anthropocene. Topics include the trade and representation of coal as early fossil fuel at the London Coal Exchange; nature itself, in this case ragweed, being mapped and discussed in American cities as an urban pollutant; the concealment of oil in post-war modernist facade systems; the establishment of courses on environmental control systems in North-American schools of architecture; the rise of air conditioning and its effects on urban space in Singapore and Doha; the globalization of the asbestos industry; buildings by Cedric Price and Ant Farm for multi-species encounters; and the Amazon rainforest, as seen through the eyes of American ethnobotanist William Balée, to be preserved as a cultural artefact. In two public events, titled „It’s complicated“ and „It’s simple“, which Förster conceived, organized and moderated, the researchers in the spring of 2018 discussed key concepts such as "energy/power", "control/system", "toxic/body", and "posthuman/nature" from a transdisciplinary perspective with Dominic Boyer, Gabrielle Hecht, Michael Osman and Etienne Turpin; and in the fall of 2018 they presented their research at The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture in collaboration with The Heymen Center for the Humanities of Columbia University with a response by Meredith TenHoor and Reinhold Martin. The results of this multidisciplinary research project will be published as a digital publication by CCA, edited by Förster, to be published in 2021.

Current PhD supervision at the University of Manchester

since 2024: Mariza Daouti, "Vulnerable Landscapes. An Urban Inquiry into the Flammability of Greek Rural Space" (1st supervisor)

since 2024: Azna Parveen Palakka Palliyali, "Spatial Manifestations of Monsoon Islam: the Mappila settlements of Malabar" (1st supervisor)

since 2023: Mariya Hamada, "From Ruins to Ecosystems: Towards an Eco-cyclical Approach to Architectural Afterlives" (1st supervisor)

since 2023: Cesar Vicencio Vega, "The Discarded City of Extractivism. The Case of the Chuquicamata Copper Mine, Chile" (2nd supervisor)

since 2021: Joshua Silver, "Architectural Processing: Rethinking the Material Medial Supports of Design Production Since 1983" (1st supervisor)

Completed PhD supervision at the University of Manchester

2018 - 2022: Adam Przywara: "The Materiality of Ruins: Rubble, Salvaged Bricks, and Waste Aggregates in the Postwar Socialist Reconstruction of Warsaw" (2nd supervisor)